Countless Hours, Part 3: Uncalibrated Interns and Immediate and Accurate Feedback

Immediate, accurate feedback begets calibration

In this third and final installment of Countless Hours:  How to Become a Stellar Student and An Incredible Intern, I will discuss the role of immediate and accurate feedback for the refinement of a skill, prediction, or prognostication to expert levels.

Imagine you are learning to play golf, but you can't see where your balls are going - it would be very difficult, without any feedback to learn to modify your swing to improve your game.  Similarly, if the feedback you received were from an observer with poor vision, and it was not accurate, you would be trying to calibrate your swing to unreliable information and your game would not improve insomuch as the feedback was inaccurate.  Finally, if you did not receive the feedback on your swings until days later, it would be difficult to analyze it and adapt your game to it, compared with iterative feedback incorporated after each swing.

The same principles apply to learning the practice of medicine.  One of the reasons that the case study books mentioned in the previous post are so instructive is that they provide immediate, and accurate feedback - you get to know if your diagnosis was correct immediately after rendering it, and this feedback, from the experts who wrote the book (often with formal or informal peer review and editing), is presumably as accurate as you can hope for.  Thus, case based practice is a very very effective way to become an expert.

Then there is the "hands on" work you do on the wards and in clinic.  Here, feedback is, on average, less immediate, and less accurate, and this is one of the ways your learning in "real life" scenarios is compromised - but there are several things you can do about it to maximize the immediacy and accuracy of feedback in these environments.