Learning, Feedback, and Decision Aids

Abstract

The first four chapters of this book were concerned with the importance of decision making for medicine. In them, we described research on how doctors gather information, generate hypotheses, and make patient management decisions. Although this research is interesting in its own right (it helps us to understand a great deal about how people think), it has a definite practical purpose as well. This purpose is the development of new teaching methods. It is a commonly expressed belief that once we understand how people make judgments, we should be able to teach them to make better ones (see Kepner & Tregoe, 1965; Schrenk, 1969). Unfortunately, despite its importance for professional training, relatively little research has focused on the best way to make doctors better decision makers. This chapter describes attempts to train people, especially doctors, to be better decision makers. Also reviewed are educational programs, computer expert systems, and other approaches to improving decision making.

Our conduct is influenced not by our experience but by our expectation of life. George Bernard Shaw