gms | German Medical Science

From athletic coaches to business leaders there is a general belief that the path to better performance is through “looking in the mirror” to openly and honestly identify one’s weaknesses and take steps to improve upon them. The health professions may provide the most extreme example, as the industry’s current models of maintenance of competence and quality assurance are formalizations, in large part, of the instruction “Physician, know thyself.” Unquestionably we each have more information available to us with which to judge our own abilities than do any external observers. It is this very wealth of information, however, that can fool us into generating inaccurate judgments of our own abilities. Various research efforts raise critical questions about the adequacy of self-judgment, emphasize the importance of looking beyond one’s self for meaningful and informative data, and suggest ways in which we might better steer learners to distinguish between cues that are useful for forming self-judgments and those that are misleading.

This tandem keynote will draw on the research/teaching nexus by demonstrating that research results in this domain should inform how students are taught to utilize self-judgment and why we must be careful about implying that judgment driven extensively by oneself is the key to life-long learning. In doing so, we will address the following questions:

• Why are medical educators interested in self-judgment (and should they be)?
• What does the research literature tell us about the value of self-judgement?
• What do we know about strategies regarding how self-judgment can be improved for the sake of performance improvement?
• What cues do, could and should guide consideration of external sources of information when striving to refine our self-judgements?
• How might models of professional self-regulation be effectively modified given the evidence-base that has accumulated to date? [1], [2]