Diagnostic Problem Solving with the Diagnostic Pathfinder

One of the parent tools to ThinkSpace is the Diagnostic Pathfinder (earlier called the Problem List Generator or PLG). Development began on the Pathfinder in late 1997. Holly Bender a veterinary clinical pathologist at Virginia Tech, sought a better way to help her students learn how to make sense of clinical laboratory data. Bender assembled a team to help her address this problem. Key members included Jared Danielson (Instructional Design), Pamela Vermeer (Computer Science) and Rick Mills (Veterinary Informaticist). Danielson conducted the interface and instructional design for the Pathfinder and Vermeer led the development. The Pathfinder was intended to help students learn how to successfully solve complicated problems involving the integration of history, signalment, clinical laboratory data, and pathophysiological mechanisms of disease. This process was difficult for students because of the large  number of new ideas that must be manipulated simultaneously to arrive at a solution. Many students would skip the laborious process of data analysis and simply jump to a diagnosis. The Pathfinder was designed to facilitate the data analysis process, helping students to learn the underlying concepts and principles in the context of clinical cases.

Several studies have been conducted with the Diagnostic Pathfinder. In three studies we found that students who used the Pathfinder to solve case-based homework problems outperformed students who participated in similar or identical curricular processes (depending on the study) but used some other mechanism for completing their homework. Effect sizes for those comparisons were .36, .58 and .70, depending on the study. These are moderate to large, by conventional standards, and in all cases the comparisons were statistically significant. The actual studies provide more detail and might be of interest.

They are:

Danielson, JA; Bender, HS; Mills, EM; Vermeer, PJ; and Lockee, BB (2003). A tool for helping veterinary students learn diagnostic problem solving. Educational Technology Research and Development 51(3):63-81. URL: http://www.springerlink.com/content/h8j2p6q706752527/

Danielson, JA; Mills, EM; Vermeer, PJ; Preast, VA; Young, KM; Christopher, MM; George, JW; Wood, DR; and Bender, HS. (2007). Characteristics of a cognitive tool that helps students learn diagnostic problem solving. Educational Technology Research and Development 55(5):499-520. URL: http://www.springerlink.com/content/h416222566728015/

In the second paper we provide some potential rationale for why the Pathfinder appeared to work, including a brief explanation of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), an idea that is useful in the opinion of the authors in explaining the Pathfinder's success. A neighboring section on this Wiki, "Foundational Ideas" introduces some additional foundational ideas that might be of interest to those who are considering teaching problem solving using the ThinkSpace tool.

Jared recorded a presentation he gave on the background of Diagnostic Pathfinder and the research that was done. View that recording here: http://cvmecho360view.cvm.iastate.edu:8080/ess/echo/presentation/cd18a88a-ae36-40d7-9bb6-d9d6f90559b2