Conceptual Knowledge Foundations for Naval Medical Training: A Scheme for Directed Curricular Planning and Instructional Design.
Abstract
A mail survey was conducted among individuals associated with Submarine IDC program, including corpsmen, corpsmen instructors and medical officers. The purpose was to identify medical conditions (e.g. appendicitis) a corpsman sees on a boat and basic medical science concepts particularly pertinent to working with these problems. Twenty eight medical conditions were identified in this manner, and they were all rated by respondents regarding there commonness, importance, difficulty, and for how well corpsmen are prepared to work with these conditions. Biomedical concepts were treated similarly. On the basis of survey results, corpsmen were tested about their ability to work clinically with several important and difficult medical conditions identified from the survey, and about their knowledge of the important related biomedical science. Second year medical students served as a comparison group. It was found that corpsmen and second year medical students (and their instructors) performed about equally well on important clinical measures, such as forming differential diagnoses, detecting danger to the patient, and taking appropriate action. However, all Navy personnel lagged far behind medical students on conceptual knowledge of the relevant basic sciences, perhaps leaving them short on ability to respond to novel conditions, to improvise, to defend their decisions to supervisors and so forth. Suggestions are made regarding changes to the corpsman training program which might help corpsmen to acquire and be able to use more basic science conceptual knowledge in their clinical practice. The results from the survey about what is important and difficult can be used to focus new instructional effort. Navy Corpsmen, Clinical Reasoning, Conceptual Understanding, Instruction, Medical Instruction.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 14, 1992
- Accession Number
- ADA249987
Entities
People
- Paul J. Feltovich
- Richard L. Coulson
Organizations
- Southern Illinois University School of Medicine