Cognitive perspectives on maintaining physicians' medical expertise: V. Using a motivational framework to understand the benefits and costs of testing.

We apply a motivational perspective to understand the implications of physicians' longitudinal assessment. We review the literature on situated expectancy-value theory, achievement goals, mindsets, anxiety, and stereotype threat in relation to testing and assessment. This review suggests several motivational benefits of testing as well as some potential challenges and costs posed by high-stakes, standardized tests.

Cognitive perspectives on maintaining physicians' medical expertise: III. Strengths and weaknesses of self-assessment.

Is self-assessment enough to keep physicians' cognitive skills-such as diagnosis, treatment, basic biological knowledge, and communicative skills-current? We review the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of self-assessment in the context of maintaining medical expertise. Cognitive science supports the importance of accurately self-assessing one's own skills and abilities, and we review several ways such accuracy can be quantified. However, our review also indicates a broad challenge in self-assessment is that individuals do not have direct access to the strength or quality of their knowledge and instead must infer this from heuristic strategies.

Cognitive perspectives on maintaining physicians' medical expertise: IV. Best practices and open questions in using testing to enhance learning and retention.

Although tests and assessments-such as those used to maintain a physician's Board certification-are often viewed merely as tools for decision-making about one's performance level, strong evidence now indicates that the experience of being tested is a powerful learning experience in its own right: The act of retrieving targeted information from memory strengthens the ability to use it again in the future, known as the testing effect. We review meta-analytic evidence for the learning benefits of testing, including in the domain of medicine, and discuss theoretical accounts of its mechanism(s). We also review key moderators-including the timing, frequency, order, and format of testing and the content of feedback-and what they indicate about how to most effectively use testing for learning.

Cognitive perspectives on maintaining physicians' medical expertise: II. Acquiring, maintaining, and updating cognitive skills.

Over the course of training, physicians develop significant knowledge and expertise. We review dual-process theory, the dominant theory in explaining medical decision making: physicians use both heuristics from accumulated experience (System 1) and logical deduction (System 2). We then discuss how the accumulation of System 1 clinical experience can have both positive effects (e.

Cognitive perspectives on maintaining physicians' medical expertise: I. Reimagining Maintenance of Certification to promote lifelong learning.

Until recently, physicians in the USA who were board-certified in a specialty needed to take a summative test every 6-10 years. However, the 24 Member Boards of the American Board of Medical Specialties are in the process of switching toward much more frequent assessments, which we refer to as longitudinal assessment. The goal of longitudinal assessments is to provide formative feedback to physicians to help them learn content they do not know as well as serve an evaluation for board certification.

Assessing Metacognitive Regulation during Problem Solving: A Comparison of Three Measures.

Metacognition is hypothesized to play a central role in problem solving and self-regulated learning. Various measures have been developed to assess metacognitive regulation, including survey items in questionnaires, verbal protocols, and metacognitive judgments. However, few studies have examined whether these measures assess the same metacognitive skills or are related to the same learning outcomes.

Seeing and doing are not believing: Investigating when and how conceptual knowledge impinges on observation and recall of physical motion.

One standard pedagogical approach in physical science courses engages students in making predictions about physical phenomena that elicit non-normative expectations, then make observations intended to provide counterevidence that sparks conceptual change. This article presents five experiments investigating conditions where observation and recall are impacted by incorrect expectations and how these theory-laden observational errors might be mitigated. Using the context of balancing, Experiments 1-3 examine how the ambiguity of the stimuli may allow observers to selectively attend to information that is consistent with prior beliefs, while discounting incongruent information.

Metacognitive study strategies in a college course and their relation to exam performance.

Several strands of prior work have evaluated students' study strategies and learning activities. In this work, we focus on integrating two of those strands. One has focused on student self-reports of their study practices from a cognitive psychology perspective.

Collaboration facilitates abstract category learning.

We examined the effects of collaboration (dyads vs. individuals) and category structure (coherent vs. incoherent) on learning and transfer.