Abstract
In this chapter, we consider recent advances in the learning sciences and their potential and actual applications in medical learning. We describe emerging ideas that broaden traditional declarative and procedural emphases in learning, with a special focus on perceptual learning—experience-induced improvements in the pickup of information. Experience in a task or domain changes perception to be more efficient at discovering and extracting relevant information and ignoring extraneous information while also reducing effort and cognitive load. These discovery and fluency changes from perceptual learning are crucial contributors to complex task performance and advanced expertise. We also examine adaptive learning and its connections to scientific research on the testing effect and the spacing effect, as well as other examples of technology-enhanced learning (TEL), including games and gamification in learning generally and medical education specifically. New learning technologies combining perceptual and adaptive learning make it possible to accelerate perceptual learning and rapidly advance aspects of expertise, such as pattern recognition, that have been elusive in most instructional contexts. We illustrate the efficacy of research-informed approaches to TEL in our work applying perceptual and adaptive learning modules (PALMs) in medical learning domains. We outline the scope of this research and illustrate characteristic elements and findings of PALMs using the example of electrocardiography. We also describe research that suggests that perceptual and adaptive learning in PALMs and related efforts have great potential to improve medical learning, not only for difficult perceptual classifications, but for factual learning and higher-order diagnostic skills as well.
Funding Announcement
The authors gratefully acknowledge research support from NIH/NCI grant 5R01CA236791 to PJK, SK, and CM; NSF ECR award 1644916 to PK and CM; and support from the US Office of Naval Research Cognitive Science of Learning, US Military JPC-1/MSIS, and US Army RDECOM programs.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to note that scientific work on perceptual learning is distinctly different from sociocultural and educational theories sometimes referred to as experiential or situated learning (e.g., communities of learners (Rogoff, 1994), situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and activity theory (Engeström et al., 1999), among others). Although both perceptual learning and sociocultural experiential learning theories emphasize the importance of extended experience to promote learning, the learning processes and outcomes that they are concerned with diverge considerably. Sociocultural learning theories are primarily focused on the learning of community norms, values, and identities, as well as workplace roles and practices as they are situated in particular contexts. They emphasize interpersonal interactions and collaborative activities as the means by which learning is structured and mediated (Yardley et al., 2012). In contrast, perceptual learning involves changes in the operation of perceptual systems that lead to domain-specific selection and more rapid pickup of relevant information, extraction of relevant patterns or relations, and reductions in effort or attentional load in perception. It is likely that experiential learning and perceptual learning co-occur. Workplace or apprenticeship learning in medical education presumably provides conditions that can support both of these types of learning.
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Kellman, P.J., Jacoby, V., Massey, C., Krasne, S. (2022). Perceptual Learning, Adaptive Learning, and Gamification: Educational Technologies for Pattern Recognition, Problem Solving, and Knowledge Retention in Medical Learning. In: Witchel, H.J., Lee, M.W. (eds) Technologies in Biomedical and Life Sciences Education. Methods in Physiology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95633-2_5
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