Enhancing diagnostic reasoning skills in nurse practitioner students: a teaching tool.

The Advanced Health Assessment course provides an opportunity to focus on critical thinking and diagnostic reasoning skills as students transition to the nurse practitioner role. The authors describe a structured teaching tool designed for faculty to use in facilitating diagnostic reasoning and clinical judgment. This tool gives faculty a format to use in the classroom or online for helping students decide which data to collect and which data are important in developing hypothesis driven differential diagnoses.