Identifying human tutoring strategies for effective instruction in internal medicine

Medicine, as a discipline, has a long-standing tradition of modeling expertise through tutorials provided inclinical practice. As lay-people many of us have witnessed first hand the bedside teaching that physiciansprovide to medical students, or we have viewed the Hollywood version of modern day medical practicethrough ER or other popular series. There is a great deal of variation in the type and quality of medicaltutorials, particularly in terms of the pedagogical theory that guides the learning experience. We areinterested in documenting these naturally occurring tutorial dialogues as a first step in developing a modelfor scaffolding learning in small group problem based settings in medicine. Our long-range goal is todevelop this tutorial model into a computer based learning environment that can help internal medicinestudents in their clinical problem solving skills