corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20318

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Hausman CL, Weiss JC, Lawrence JS, Zeleznik C.
Confidence weighted answer technique in a group of pediatric residents.
Med Teach 1990; 12:(2):163-8
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2079890


Abstract:

Physicians who are excessively underconfident or overconfident about their knowledge may have impaired clinical judgement. Confidence weighting of multiple choice examinations asks test-takers to state how confident they are that the answers they selected are correct. This previously described method allows the examinee to receive ‘overconfidence’ and ‘underconfidence’ scores. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that these scores would correlate with faculty assessment of pediatric residents’ confidence level as observed in the clinical setting. Thirty-three pediatric residents took an examination of general pediatric knowledge using confidence weighting method. Percentage of questions answered correctly ranged from 40 to 81%. There was an association between increasing overconfidence and lower examination scores (r = 0.58; p = 0.001). Increasing overconfidence was also associated with decreasing underconfidence (r = 0.38; p = 0.04). Five faculty members, the program director and the chief resident were asked to rate their perceptions of the residents’ confidence on a Likert-type scale. The period of observation ranged from 9 months to 3 years. Linear regression demonstrated an association between underconfidence indices and observed confidence in the clinical setting (r = 0.39; p = 0.03). In addition, three of four residents who left the program had either over- or underconfidence indices greater than one standard deviation from the mean. These results indicate that the multiple choice examination with confidence weighting can predict residents who will be judged as underconfident by clinical preceptors. This finding is important in light of our impression that such house officers often have difficulties later during their residencies.

Keywords:
Humans Internship and Residency* Learning Pediatrics/education* Regression Analysis Self Concept*

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909