gms | German Medical Science

Portfolios are increasingly used in medical education, in particular to stimulate and assess the students’ reflection on their learning process. It is generally accepted that the pedagogical success of a portfolio depends on the precise definition of its objectives and on the quality of its curricular integration.

The medical school of the University of Lausanne is currently integrating a learning portfolio into its undergraduate clinical skills education program. We have defined two main aims: to provide students the necessary tools to track their progress towards the learning objectives defined by the national catalogue for undergraduate studies, and to support their development towards becoming reflective practitioners. With a limited time dedicated to clinical skills education, our overall goal is to maximize its impact on students’ progress by structuring their learning with a longitudinal portfolio extending throughout the 4 years of undergraduate skills training, accompanied by an appropriate mentoring program.

To foster the process of reflective practice among both students and mentors, we base our approach on an extended model of the reflective learning cycle, which explicitly integrates feedback. This model requires students to actively participate in the reflective process by seeking external feedback, comparing it to their internal feedback (auto-evaluation) and subsequently applying the newly developed knowledge to related situations. The introduction of this model of reflective practice will require a substantial change in the local feedback culture at the level of both students and teachers.

We will present our conceptual model and discuss the implications it has for the implementation of the e-portfolio within the clinical skills education program. We will also develop the functional requirements of an e-portfolio tool that can efficiently support this process.