Learning how to teach

Blog #6
by Nishani

This week, my CEEP selective partner and I started working on our teaching exercise for our fellow classmates. When discussing our ideas with our preceptor, the terms base rate fallacy and recency bias came up. Base rate fallacy occurs when available statistical data is ignored in favor of specific data to make a probability judgement. In a medical context, this could be described as what happens if you quickly diagnose a patient with Disease X when you see Symptom Y without taking into account the actual prevalence of Disease X and the constellation of symptoms that would increase the likelihood of this person having this disease. Recency bias is the tendency to form judgements based largely on the most recent observations and not taking into account the whole range of data. An example of this might be being quick to diagnose Disease X in a patient shortly after attending a teaching session on Disease X without perhaps taking into account its prevalence or the whole constellation of symptoms a patient has.

For our teaching exercise, we wanted to use photos of hand findings to work through a series of cases of patients with various diseases. Through our medical training, we were taught specific skills to examine the hands. Most often, these skills were taught on healthy patients. Consequently, my partner agreed with me that although we know to look for certain findings, we are uncertain about whether we would be able to confidently name what we find on examination. We thought including several photographs of positive findings on examination to use in our teaching exercise would be beneficial. However, taking into account the concepts of base rate fallacy and recency bias, we decided to shift our focus slightly to emphasize the investigation of the hand finding rather than the specific disease each finding is associated with. I think we are both beginning to recognize the numerous elements that need to be taken into consideration when delivering a “simple” lesson in clinical skills and medicine.