August 27, 2007
Readers of this blog know that I am interested in mindmapping and other visual presentation strategies as tools for training clinicians in suicide risk assessment (see related posts listed below). In a previous post marked “needs development” I noted:
Really, there is a “basic science” set of questions about learning and the clinician mind that gets skipped over when we do the necessary and important work of evaluating educational interventions.
Thanks to a post on PsychNews, I came across this interesting article in Cognitive Daily that attempts to provide some explanations for why visual memories are often so vivid. One of the take-home points of the study cited in the article is that the vividness of visual memory is directly related to the duration of viewing. This is unsurprising in some ways, but it supports the educational strategy of using one or two maps or other graphics (rather than a multitude of Powerpoint slides or text handouts) to teach about a clinical concept like risk assessment. Participants in my trainings, for example, view one map (whose branches I dynamically hid and show) for nearly the entire presentation.
These little bits of basic science evidence remind me, once again, that we pay too little attention to the evidence base of our teaching techniques. It is well and good to decideto pursue evidence-based interventions and therapuetics (EBIT, as we call it around here), but what is often missing (besides a coherent notion of what constitutes evidence–a topic for another day) is an evidence-based way of disseminating evidence-based practice to clinicians.
Visual maps and guides in high stress situations
Evidence for visually different presentation format
Tech tools for clinical thinking and training
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