‘Is that normal?’ Pre‐clerkship students’ approaches to professional dilemmas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Context has been recognised as a key variable in studies of medical student professionalism, yet the effect of students' stage of training has not been well explored, despite growing recognition that medical students begin to form their professional ethos from their earliest medical school experiences. The purpose of this study, which builds on previous research involving clinical clerks, was to explore the decision-making processes of pre-clerkship medical students in the face of standardised professional dilemmas. METHODS: Structured interviews were conducted with 30 pre-clerkship (Years 1 and 2) medical students at one institution. During the interviews, students were asked to respond to five videotaped scenarios, each of which depicted a student facing a professional dilemma. Transcripts were analysed using an existing theoretical framework based on a constructivist grounded theory approach. RESULTS: Pre-clerkship students' approaches to professional dilemmas were largely similar to those of clerks, despite their limited clinical experience, with several notable exceptions. For example, reliance on instincts and emotions was not as pervasive, but concerns with systems-associated issues were more recurrent. These findings were explored in the context of theory on professional identity formation. CONCLUSIONS: As the novice student constructs a professional identity, he or she may feel the need to take on the role of doctor and shed that of student, a process that involves the suppressing of emotions, but this may be misguided. Educators should be aware of these stages of identity formation and tailor their teaching and evaluation of professionalism accordingly.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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 teacher head, 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".