Abstract
The application of cognitive psychology to medical education has been hampered by a failure to distinguish between specific theories that explain psychological phenomena and general frameworks that provide psychological rationales for educational situations. This has resulted in considerable misunderstanding by practitioners wishing to apply the results of this research. For example, Barrows (1990) criticizes cognitive research on medical problem solving as having been primarily restricted to clinical diagnosis and hence largely irrelevant to the overall workup of a patient. What he seems to have in mind is an encompassing cognitive framework in which all the psychological aspects of the workup can be covered, and that only experiments examining this total framework should be taken seriously. However, there are compelling reasons to believe that a cognitive framework and a cognitive theory are inherently quite different and that an understanding of the relationship between the two is important for applications of psychological research to educational practice. As Anderson (1983) puts it, a framework is a general pool of constructs for understanding a domain, but it is not tightly enough organized to constitute a predictive theory.
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Patel, V.L., Groen, G.J. (1992). Cognitive Frameworks for Clinical Reasoning: Application for Training and Practice. In: Evans, D.A., Patel, V.L. (eds) Advanced Models of Cognition for Medical Training and Practice. NATO ASI Series, vol 97. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-02833-9_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-02833-9_11
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