Music lessons: revealing medicine's learning culture through a comparison with that of music
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: Research on medical learning has tended to focus on the individual learner, but a sufficient understanding of the learning process requires that attention also be paid to the essential influence of the cultural context within which learning takes place. In this study, we undertook a comparative examination of two learning cultures - those of music and medicine - in order to unearth assumptions about learning that are taken for granted within the medical culture. METHODS: We used a constructivist grounded theory approach to explore experiences of learning within the two cultures. We conducted nine focus groups (two with medical students, three with residents, four with music students) and four individual interviews (with one clinician-educator, one music educator and two doctor-musicians), for a total of 37 participants. Analysis occurred alongside and informed data collection. Themes were identified iteratively using constant comparisons. RESULTS: Cultural perspectives diverged in terms of where learning should occur, what learning outcomes are desired, and how learning is best facilitated. Whereas medicine valued learning by doing, music valued learning by lesson. Whereas medical learners aimed for competence, music students aimed instead for ever-better performance. Whereas medical learners valued their teachers for their clinical skills more than for their teaching abilities, the opposite was true in music, in which teachers' instructional skills were paramount. Self-assessment challenged learners in both cultures, but medical learners viewed self-assessment as a skill they could develop, whereas music students recognised that external feedback would always be required. CONCLUSIONS: This comparative analysis reveals that medicine and music make culturally distinct assumptions about teaching and learning. The contrasts between the two cultures illuminate potential vulnerabilities in the medical learning culture, including the risks inherent in its competence-focused approach and the constraints it places on its own teachers. By highlighting these vulnerabilities, we provide a stimulus for reimagining and renewing medicine's educational practices.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
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".