Introduction:

Clinical reasoning involves critical thinking and decision-making in clinical situations. It can be evaluated using Objective structured clinical examination (OSCE), which measures clinical skills associated with the development of clinical reasoning.

Objective:

To describe the implementation of an OSCE to evaluate the clinical skills associated with the development of clinical reasoning in physical therapy students, and to determine their level of satisfaction with this methodology.

Materials and methods:

Cross-sectional descriptive study conducted in 159 physical therapy students from Universidad Andres Bello, Chile, enrolled in the Reasoning in Physical therapy course (second semester of 2018). The OSCE had 11 stations and a student satisfaction survey was administered. Data normality was determined using the Shapiro-Wilk test. Descriptive statistics (percentages, medians, and interquartile ranges (IQR)) were used for data analysis.

Results:

The median global score was 142 points (IQR: 132-150) and 61.1% of the students obtained a passing score (> 134 points). Stations in which most students had a passing score were S3, S5 and S7 (standardized patient stations): 78.62%, 96.85% and 85.53%, respectively. Regarding the satisfaction survey, 36.48% and 59.12% of the students agreed and strongly agreed with using tools that assess their clinical skills.

Conclusions:

The OSCE was successfully designed and implemented to evaluate the clinical skills associated with the development of clinical reasoning in physical therapy students, and most of them reported a high level of satisfaction with its use; this confirms OSCE is an excellent methodology to train and evaluate these students.

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