TEACHING COGNITIVE E-LEARNING IN CLINICAL HEALTH DISCIPLINES: PROPOSAL FOR A CHECKLIST

Heuristic reasoning strategies predominate in the clinical environment. These rapid and intuitive thinking processes are very common, easily influenced by many factors such as conditions, surrounding context, age or experience, and are associated with failures in perception, failed heuristics and cognitive biases. In dentistry, particularly in the daily clinical practice of orthodontics, it is becoming essential to be able to make diagnoses under pressure, which increases the cognitive errors made by students. Reducing this kind of error, as well as improving cognitive learning, is becoming an important objective in health specialisms. The authors describe and analyse heuristic learning, cognitive bias and error in the field of orthodontics. Metacognitive training, and the acquisition of the general rules that regulate the specific ones that students normally acquire, is essential for reducing errors of intuition and heuristics. In this article, therefore, we fully develop the context of the checklist in order to avoid these undesirable negative outcomes. A checklist is proposed and described as an alternative to students relying on their clinical memory of patients, a means of improving practical learning in clinical disciplines, and considerably reducing diagnostic and treatment errors.