The Promise of the New Educational Strategy for Curriculum Development (SPICES) Model on the Development of Students’ Clinical Reasoning Ability. A Comparative Cross-Sectional Study

INTRODUCTION: Clinical reasoning skills are a core competency that must be taught at all levels of health-care education. In the last decade, several health professional education curricula in Ethiopia have been redesigned with the goal of improving student competence in key health-care delivery skills. Despite the fact that some academic programs followed the conventional educational strategy, a significant number of academic programs adopted a new educational strategy for curriculum development: Student-centered, Problem-based, Integrated, Community-based, Elective, and Systematic (SPICES) model. More empirical evidence, however, is required to determine whether the new curricular approach is effective in improving students’ clinical reasoning. The purpose of this study is to determine whether the new educational strategy for curriculum development improves the clinical reasoning ability of midwifery students when compared to a peer institution that follows a traditional curriculum. METHODS: A comparative cross-sectional study was conducted to compare the clinical reasoning skills of midwifery students who completed the new curricular approach versus students who completed a traditional curriculum. A Script Concordance Test (SCT) was used to collect data. The mean SCT score and an independent two-sample t-test were calculated to see if the two groups differed significantly in terms of clinical reasoning skills in managing Post-Partum hemorrhage (PPH). RESULTS: A total of 77 final-year midwifery students participated (38 from the new and 39 from the traditional curriculum approach). Midwifery students who completed the new and conventional curriculum approaches had mean clinical reasoning SCT scores of 0.7 (SD = 0.35) and 0.53 (SD = 0.37), respectively. There was a statistically significant difference in the overall mean SCT score between the two study groups in terms of clinical reasoning skills (p = 0.008). CONCLUSION: Our study found that the new SPICES model curricular approach is promising in fostering the development of clinical reasoning skills of Midwifery students in managing PPH.