Teaching clinical reasoning to psychology students: an exploratory study on the potential of a podcast training

Background: Clinical reasoning is a construct shared by all health professions, which, starting from a problem or a series of symptoms, through the recounting of useful information, arrive at a diagnostic and treatment hypothesis. This paper aims to reflect on the possibility of including the teaching of clinical reasoning within the curricula of psychologists in training, even more so in light of the approval of the law on qualifying degrees. Method: A quasi-experiment was conducted between a group of psychology students exposed to clinical reasoning through a podcast training and another group of students who used a more traditional methodology of studying a script. Results: The findings revealed an improvement in the acquisition of clinical reasoning by the group of students exposed to podcast training in contrast to their colleagues who had studied written materials. Conclusions: The clinical reasoning assessment tool developed in the study could become a very functional tool for assessing the improvement of this skill in future clinical psychologists, even with the benefit of more sophisticated virtual reality technologies for the design of podcasts that would allow for a more immersive and realistic experience.