“Grabbing” Autonomy When the Learning Environment Doesn’t Support it: An Evidence-based Guide for Medical Learners
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to self-determination theory (SDT), environments which support the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness will facilitate autonomous motivation, learning, and wellness. On the other hand, environments which introduce external controls and power dynamics into the equation will do the opposite. Educational studies support these principles, yet most have focused on learners' need satisfaction as a passive process (e.g., via support or hindrance by educators), rather than the agentic pursuit that SDT emphasizes. In this commentary, I draw on my experience as a practicing physician and SDT researcher, and focus on how medical learners can "grab" more autonomy when the learning environment does not support it. I present a hypothetical case of a preceptor whose teaching style is controlling and unfortunately well-known to medical learners. I then unpack the case and outline different strategies that medical learners can use to navigate this type of interpersonal conflict.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.048 | 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 it