Introduction:

The difficulties present in health sciences education are experienced by teachers and students in disciplinary subjects. Teachers need to deliver and evaluate large volumes of content and students must assimilate these quickly in order to obtain adequate performance.

Objective:

To evaluate the effectiveness of creating conceptual maps on performance, in the subject Clinical Reasoning of the Kinesiology major of a private university of the V Region, Chile.

Methods:

Quasiexperimental study with the participation of two groups, a control group and an experimental group. In the experimental group, the intervention was applied with the incorporation of the tool for creating conceptual maps in two thematic units. Pre- and post-intervention performance was evaluated. The study population consisted of two groups of students of Kinesiology (n=55), who attended the subject Clinical Reasoning of the seventh semester, corresponding to the first semester of 2017, of the curriculum in the Kinesiology major at a private university in the city of the V region, Chile.

Results:

The pre- and post-intervention performance indicated a significant difference in the qualifications corresponding to units II and III in the experimental group (paired t-test p<0.0001). When comparing the performance between both groups, control and experimental, the latter obtained an average of significantly higher scores than the control group in units II and III (t-test, p<0.0001). Unit I did not show notable differences between the control group and the experimental group (ANOVA/Bonferroni post hoc test, p>0.05).

Conclusions:

The strategy of creating conceptual maps increases the performance in the subject Critical Reasoning, for the addressing of clinical problems. The creation of conceptual maps favors learning and allows the identification of skills that denote greater difficulty in students. The incorporation of these maps in systematic training is proposed as a teaching and evaluation tool.

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