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Every day physicians make judgments about patient management and diagnosis based on less than perfect information from many different sources. Judgment and decision-making research has taught us a great deal about such decisions, but these insights rarely find their way into the medical curriculum. One productive line of investigation in the study of judgment and decision making has followed the insights and theories developed by the psychologist, Egon Brunswik. His theories are becoming increasingly relevant to modern judgment problems. In this paper, I outline Brunswik's theories, trace their development over the last 50 years and speculate on what role they should play in medical education.

There is evidence that students who are given information about how they appear to weigh information in reaching a judgment can learn to make judgments more accurately. A microcomputer system was used to generate simulated cases and then calculate the relationship between the data presented and the student's diagnosis. (Author/MLW)

Videotapes of simulated student case presentations were used to determine whether personal characteristics of medical students influence the evaluation of their clinical ability. The results indicate that personal characteristics of students can significantly influence their evaluations and that faculty members do not appear to share common evaluation standards. (Author/JMD)

A method for selecting which procedural skills should be mastered by medicine residents is described. Residents and faculty at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine were asked to select from a list skills essential to completing the three-year general internal medicine residency. (Author/MLW)

A method for selecting performance variables to be used in the evaluation of the clinical performance of internal medicine residents is described. Twenty of the highest ranking variables are listed, as determined by the formal sampling of the opinion of full-time and volunteer faculty and residents associated with the University of Nebraska. (JMD)

An educational intervention was effective in improving the judgment of experienced student-health physicians (N=11) in predicting positive culture in simulated patients with pharyngitis. The intervention was three parts: an initial one-hour lecture; three sessions with computer-based cognitive feedback; and monthly reports of the percentage of positive throat cultures. (MLW)