Does providing the correct diagnosis as feedback after self-explanation improve medical students diagnostic performance?

Background: Self-explanation without feedback has been shown to improve medical students' diagnostic reasoning. While feedback is generally seen as beneficial for learning, available evidence of the value of its combination with self-explanation is conflicting. This study investigated the effect on medical students' diagnostic performance of adding immediate or delayed content-feedback to self-explanation while solving cases. Methods: Ninety-four 3rd-year students from a Canadian medical school were randomly assigned to three experimental conditions (immediate-feedback, delayed-feedback, control). In the learning phase, all students solved four clinical cases by giving i) the most likely diagnosis, ii) two main arguments supporting this diagnosis, and iii) two plausible alternative diagnoses, while using self-explanation. The immediate-feedback group was given the correct diagnosis after each case; delayed-feedback group received the correct diagnoses only after the four cases; control group received n