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Knowledge Application and Transfer for Complex Tasks in Ill-Structured Domains: Implications for Instruction and Testing in Biomedicine

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Advanced Models of Cognition for Medical Training and Practice

Part of the book series: NATO ASI Series ((NATO ASI F,volume 97))

Abstract

Educational transfer occurs when knowledge, acquired in a specific context or for one purpose, is used in a different context or for a different purpose. There are the obvious cases of transfer, for example, the transfer of knowledge learned in a school classroom to the running of a business. However, many less obvious instances of transfer involve the productive utilization (applicatioĊ„) of knowledge in doing substantial cognitive tasks, since these tasks are not likely to duplicate exactly the conditions under which the pertinent knowledge was acquired (cf. Voss 1978). In complex professional domains such as medicine, two kinds of failures of transfer and knowledge application have often been identified. One involves the demonstration of erratic clinical competence from one instance of knowledge application to another. That is, practitioners may handle certain clinical cases quite well while performing poorly on others (e.g., Barrows et al. 1978; Elstein et al. 1978). The second is the difficulty that individuals appear to have in applying conceptual knowledge from pertinent basic sciences to clinical problem solving tasks (e.g., Lesgold et al. 1988; Myers et al. 1990; Patel et al. 1989; Patel et al. 1991 ).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cognitive Science Division, Department of Medical Education, Department of Psychiatry, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Box 3926, Springfield, IL, 62708, USA

    Paul J. Feltovich

  2. Department of Physiology, Cognitive Science Division, Department of Medical Education, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, USA

    Richard L. Coulson

  3. Center for the Study of Reading, Department of Educational Psychology Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

    Rand J. Spiro

  4. American Board of Internal Medicine, USA

    Beth K. Dawson-Saunders

Authors
  1. Paul J. Feltovich
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  2. Richard L. Coulson
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  3. Rand J. Spiro
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  4. Beth K. Dawson-Saunders
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Computational Linguistics Departments of Philosophy and Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 15213, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    David A. Evans

  2. Cognitive Studies in Medicine, Centre for Medical Education, McGill University, 1110 Pine Avenue West, H3A 1A3, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Vimla L. Patel

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Âİ 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Feltovich, P.J., Coulson, R.L., Spiro, R.J., Dawson-Saunders, B.K. (1992). Knowledge Application and Transfer for Complex Tasks in Ill-Structured Domains: Implications for Instruction and Testing in Biomedicine. 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_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-02833-9_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-08144-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-02833-9

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