USE OF A NOVEL BOARD GAME IN A CLINICAL ROTATION FOR LEARNING THORACIC DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSES IN VETERINARY MEDICAL IMAGING

When confronted with various findings on thoracic radiographs, fourth‐year veterinary students often have difficulty generating appropriate lists of differential diagnoses. The purpose of this one‐group, pretest, posttest experimental study was to determine if a game could be used as an adjunct teaching method to improve students’ understanding of connections between imaging findings and differential diagnoses. A novel board game focusing on differential diagnoses in thoracic radiography was developed. One hundred fourth‐year veterinary students took a brief pretest, played the board game, and took a brief posttest as a part of their respective clinical radiology rotations. Pretest results were compared to posttest results using a paired t‐test to determine if playing the game impacted student understanding. Students’ mean scores on the posttest were significantly higher than mean pretest scores (P < 0.0001). Thus, results indicate that playing the board game resulted in improved short‐term understanding of thoracic differential diagnoses by fourth‐year students, and use of the board game on a clinical rotation seems to be a beneficial part of the learning process.