Theoretical perspectives in medical education: past experience and future possibilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: Pedagogical practices reflect theoretical perspectives and beliefs that people hold about learning. Perspectives on learning are important because they influence almost all decisions about curriculum, teaching and assessment. Since Flexner's 1910 report on medical education, significant changes in perspective have been evident. Yet calls for major reform of medical education may require a broader conceptualisation of the educational process. PAST AND CURRENT PERSPECTIVES: Medical education has emerged as a complex transformative process of socialisation into the culture and profession of medicine. Theory and research, in medical education and other fields, have contributed important understanding. Learning theories arising from behaviourist, cognitivist, humanist and social learning traditions have guided improvements in curriculum design and instruction, understanding of memory, expertise and clinical decision making, and self-directed learning approaches. Although these remain useful, additional perspectives which recognise the complexity of education that effectively fosters the development of knowledge, skills and professional identity are needed. FUTURE PERSPECTIVES: Socio-cultural learning theories, particularly situated learning, and communities of practice offer a useful theoretical perspective. They view learning as intimately tied to context and occurring through participation and active engagement in the activities of the community. Legitimate peripheral participation describes learners' entry into the community. As learners gain skill, they assume more responsibility and move more centrally. The community, and the people and artefacts within it, are all resources for learning. Learning is both collective and individual. Social cognitive theory offers a complementary perspective on individual learning. Situated learning allows the incorporation of other learning perspectives and includes workplace learning and experiential learning. Viewing medical education through the lens of situated learning suggests teaching and learning approaches that maximise participation and build on community processes to enhance both collective and individual learning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".