Speech-language pathology students : learning clinical reasoning

In the last edition of this book, our colleagues Lindy McAllister and Miranda Rose (2008) suggested there was confusion in terminology use between ‘clinical decision making’ and ‘clinical reasoning’. They argued that the process of making clinical decisions, i.e., the reasoning, was not explicit and that it needed to be. They presented curriculum options that might develop clinical reasoning skills in SLP such as PBL and ideas that ‘… will serve as a catalyst for discussion of clinical reasoning in our profession’ (p.403). The scope of SLP practice has continued to change, and we now have a standardized assessment tool, COMPASS (McAllister et al., 2006), for assessing SLP students on clinical placements, which is used in Australia and overseas. One of the four core professional competency units of assessment in the tool is ‘reasoning’. These core competencies support the development and maintenance of the seven occupational competencies (Speech Pathology Association of Australia, 2011). Clinical reasoning is now an explicit component of the education of student speech pathologists and is a common term in the professional vocabulary of students and CEs. COMPASS requires students to demonstrate thinking skills and show how they integrate collaborative and holistic viewpoints into their reasoning, i.e., the client and caregivers’ views, opinions and wishes, along with current best evidence, which might inform students’ decision making. The E3BP and ICf frameworks can also assist students and clinicians to integrate information into the reasoning process