- Research:
- Assessing Anesthesiology Expertise
We are working
in conjunction with Mathew Weinger, MD at the University of California, to
assess the deep, tacit knowledge structures that are assumed to underlie anesthesiology
expertise.
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Psychological scaling techniques such as Pathfinder and Multi-Dimensional
Scaling are used to assess the knowledge of anesthesiology students and experts.
Another goal of this research is to determine if such psychological scaling
methods can be used to assess anesthesiology expertise during training.
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Figure 1. Experts vs. First Year Aggregate Pathfinder Networks. The value on each link is the percentage of individual expert networks (bold font) and individual first-year networks (normal font) that contained that link.
Qualitative comparisons revealed different cognitive structures depending
on level of the clinical expertise:
- For example, “Time Pressure” and “Heart Rate” concepts differentiated experts and novices (as was predicted pre-data collection interviews).
- Interesting that all novices saw “Volume Status” and “Blood Pressure” as highly related, but none of the experts drown such connection.
- Moreover, the majority of experts (but none of the novices) connected “Spontaneous Movements” and “Level of Consciousness”
The correlation between the results from oral clinical exam and the Pathfinder derived knowledge score was significant, r (13) =.53, p =.04.
This finding
supports the validity of the Pathfinder approach as an indicator of residents’
knowledge
