Case-based teaching & clinical reasoning: seeing how students think with PATSy

This chapter introduces PATSy (www.patsy.ac.uk): a web-based multimedia database shell that has been designed to accept data from any discipline that has cases. PATSy makes `virtual patients' available to trainees, educators and researchers in various clinical professions and cognate academic disciplines. The systems contains 61 data-rich and extensively described cases of adults and children with disorders that can be accessed under 4 domain headings - speech and language, dyslexia, medical rehabilitation and neuropsychology. PATSy functions as both an archive for research and clinical cases and a community resource. A brief history on the development of PATSy is provided, together with a description of a typical student user session. The roles that PATSy can play in speech and language therapy education are also discussed. Different methods of teaching with PATSy and examples of how PATSy supports didactic, case-based and problem-based methods of teaching and learning in speech and language therapy are provided. The use of PATSy as a research tool for studying clinical reasoning and problem-solving is described and illustrated with examples from an investigation of student reasoning. It is argued that PATSy can act as bridges between research and education and between research and clinical practise.