Yields and Rabbit Holes: Medical Students’ Typologies of Sufficient Knowledge

Knopes, Julia

doi:10.1080/01459740.2019.1640220

Cited by 7 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…For this reason, students eschewed traditional textbooks, which they believed contained too much irrelevant information. As first noted in another publication (Knopes 2019), one first-year student found that "textbooks go into a lot of detail and background… it's an inefficient way of delivering knowledge." The student preferred Firecracker and Sketchy Medical, two online platforms that seek to enhance recall of biomedical information through flash cards and images, rather than blocks of text on a page where the most central concepts are not always readily apparent.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…In particular, medical students' evaluation and selection of learning resources underscore how meaningful that efficiency is for physicians-in-training, as both a form of competence and as a distinctive virtue, as well as a challenge to competence. These learning resources span review books, flash cards, websites, and videos, amongst others, that students describe as "high yield," meaning they spare extraneous information most often found in detailed, traditional textbooks or didactic lectures (Knopes 2019). In other words, all of the knowledge contained in the resource will ideally "yield" strong exam scores.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following Fox, Knopes later found that medical students are socialized to contend with the unmanageably large amount of information encountered in their studies by prioritizing some forms of knowledge over others, depending on the perceived utility of that knowledge for exams and future clinical practice (Knopes 2019(Knopes , 2020(Knopes , 2021. This process is identified as sufficient knowledge.…”

Section: Uncertainty and Sufficient Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

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Beyond Competence: Efficiency in American Biomedicine

Knopes

Cascio

2022

Cult Med Psychiatry

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Competence" is a longstanding value of American biomedicine. One underidentified corollary of competence is efficiency: at once a manifestation of competence, a challenge to competence, and a virtue in its own right. We will explore the social construction of efficiency in US undergraduate medical education through an analysis of its sociocultural and technological landscapes. We present qualitative data from two allopathic medical school field sites in the Midwestern United States, where medical students' careful selection of certain learning resources and overall perspectives on the curriculum underscore their focus on efficiency and pragmatic approaches to knowledge. In the discussion, we consider the ethical implications of physician efficiency, as well as future trajectories for the study of efficiency in the medical social sciences, bioethics, and medical education. We posit that efficiency is at the theoretical heart of US medical practice and education: a finding that has wide-reaching implications for how researchers conceptualize the enterprise of biomedicine across cultural contexts and interpret the lived experiences of physicians, medical students, and other clinicians.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Uncertainty and Sufficient Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

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Beyond Competence: Efficiency in American Biomedicine

Knopes

Cascio

2022

Cult Med Psychiatry

Self Cite

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“…This abundance of knowledge raises pertinent questions, chiefly among them how medical students decide what is important to learn. Knopes (2020aKnopes ( , 2020b has investigated the management of ignorance and knowledge in medical professional socialization. She developed the notion of "sufficient knowledge" to describe "the process of emphasizing information with the greatest perceived utility for a particular condition of training or situation of medical practice, while deliberately deemphasizing or ignoring information that is not deemed necessary in context" (p. 447).…”

Section: Culture Medicine and Psychiatry "Anthropologies Of Clinical ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Articulating the canon: The sociology of medical education from 1980 to 2000

Vinson

2021

Health (London)

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An exciting development in the sociology of medical education has been its recent return as a distinct scholarly conversation in medical sociology. During the 1980s and 1990s, the sociology of medical education, an historically prominent subfield in sociology, seemed to disappear from the scholarly conversation despite ongoing development in this area. In this narrative review I describe this “missing period” of sociology of medical education, discussing complementary explanations for why it receded and describing what research activity did take place during those decades. In reviewing this work, I argue that articulating theoretical advances made within sociology of medical education research during these decades allows us to link foundational research from the 1950s and 1960s with the renaissance of this subfield in the early 2000s. Fundamentally, understanding the intellectual history and development of this subfield supports a broader movement to understand the import of studies of medical training for exploring questions of interest in general sociology.

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“…. the perspectives from which the students view their day-to-day problems in relation to their long-term goals.” More recent scholarship similarly finds that medical students strategize what material is worth studying closely and what material is not (Knopes 2020). Indeed, current medical students appear to be actively appraising the “day-to-day problems” of how to most effectively study in medical school “in relation to their long-term goals” (Becker et al 1961:435).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Your Doctor Didn’t Go to Class: Student Culture, High-Stakes Testing, and Novel Coupling Configurations in an Allopathic Medical School

2022

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A clear pattern has emerged in allopathic medical schools across the United States: Most medical students have stopped going to class. While this trend among students is well known in medical education, few studies to date have examined the underlying sociological mechanisms driving this collective behavior or how these dynamics are related to institutional change in medical education. Drawing on 33 in-depth interviews with medical students in an allopathic medical school, we examine medical student culture and its role in shaping how medical students make sense of the institutionalized licensing requirement of the United States Medical Licensing Exam. We find that medical students learn to rely on digital recordings of their course content and third-party digital resources for Step 1 prep and stop attending their academic courses in person altogether. We argue that medical students create novel coupling configurations between local interaction and institutionalized licensure rules via their student cultures.

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Yields and Rabbit Holes: Medical Students’ Typologies of Sufficient Knowledge

Cited by 7 publications

References 38 publications

Beyond Competence: Efficiency in American Biomedicine

Beyond Competence: Efficiency in American Biomedicine

Articulating the canon: The sociology of medical education from 1980 to 2000

Why Your Doctor Didn’t Go to Class: Student Culture, High-Stakes Testing, and Novel Coupling Configurations in an Allopathic Medical School

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