PITUITARY METASTASIS FROM BLADDER UROTHELIAL CARCINOMA: A RARE CASE REPORT AND A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON PITUITARY METASTASIS OVER THE LAST DECADE.

In education, students are confronted with cases based on real-life or authentic professional tasks, for instance, varied workplace situations, because this type of situation helps them to integrate knowledge, skills and attitudes and adequately prepares them for practice []. Virtual Patients (VPs) provide good opportunities to practice different scenarios in a safe environment []. To enhance transfer to practice, the VP cases that are offered to students should differ from each other in an authentic context, because this “variability of practice” will help transfer of learning []. Transfer of learning is essential in medical education because clinical reasoning skills developed in one case must be flexibly applied to patients with varying characteristics and contexts []. For example, the same disease may require different diagnostic or treatment decisions depending on the patient’s age, comorbidities, or lifestyle factors []. According to Perkins and Salomon’s definition, transfer of learning refers to the ability to apply prior learning in new situations []. It involves near transfer, where knowledge is applied in contexts that are quite similar to the original learning situation, and far transfer, where more abstract principles are applied in novel or structurally different contexts []. Literature suggests that near and far transfer can both be facilitated through practice with a variety of cases and by providing scaffolding []. Both near and far transfer are enhanced by stimulating abstraction and analogical reasoning across cases []. The transfer process is supported by abstraction, where learners generalize underlying principles beyond surface features, and by recognizing structural similarities across contexts, which allow them to apply prior learning to new contexts []. In this study, near transfer refers to applying knowledge learned from one neck cancer case to another case within the same domain. Far transfer refers to applying the same underlying reasoning principles to a different domain, for example, from neck cancer case to lung cancer case.