Abstract:

A challenge in higher education for the Speech Therapy Degree is the training in clinical reasoning skills. Speech Therapy students' competences are progressively developed by transferring and improving the knowledge they acquire in several subjects by applying it to different clinical situations in an integrated and repeated way. Usually, curricula do not include a sistematic method for training to solve clinical problems.
In this framework, the authors have created the computer-based Language Assessment Training System (LATS) tool. This tool is a clinical reasoning training system for the diagnosis of virtual cases with language problems. The LATS has been developed and funded by different Innovation Projects of the University of Málaga (PIE 10-12, PIE 13-15, PIE 17-19, PIE 19-21).

Aim:
The aim of this communication is to show the usefulness of LATS in the training of clinical reasoning skills for students of Speech and Language Therapy Grade.

Method:
LATS has been used with 3rd and 4th year Speech and Language Therapy students at the University of Málaga. This academic semester it has been impossible to collect new data due to the Covid crisis19.

Results:
From our previous work, analyzing student performance after using the LATS tool we can argue that a) repeated use of LATS improves student performance (Calleja, Rodriguez and Luque, 2018) , b) students achieve the basic principles of clinical reasoning when trained with the LATS tool (Luque, Rodriguez, Calleja and Ferrer, 2019).

Conclusions:
The LATS is a useful tool to develop and assess the clinical diagnostic skills of Speech Therapy students.

Keywords:

Clinical competence training, clinical reasoning, virtual cases, speech therapy.