Debriefing of virtual patient encounters: Systematic collection of nursing students clinical reasoning activities

Background. Studies have shown that nursing students have challenges in translating and applying their theoretical knowledge in a clinical context. Virtual patients (VPs) have been proposed as an adequate learning and assessment activity to improve clinical reasoning. Although feedback and debriefing are essential aspects to foster learning in medical simulation, few studies have explored systematic and theory anchored ways of supporting feed forward and debriefing based on student activity collected in a systematic manner.