Excellence in teaching

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR KIM KIRSNER of the Department of Psychology has twenty years' teaching experience specialising in 'Cognitive Psychology and Human Factors'.

Kim, together with Dr Andrew Page (Department of Psychology), Roger Dickinson (Department of Human Movement) and Kathryn Hird (Department of Speech and Hearing Science, Curtin University), received a grant from the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching (CAUT) for a project entitled 'Case based reasoning and the acquisition of diagnostic expertise'. Dr Murray Maybery, Dr Jan Fletcher and Mr Danny Boase-Jelinek of the Department of Psychology have subsequently joined the team.

Clinical training in the behavioural and medical sciences requires extensive exposure to individual cases. Students need contact with patients with a variety of conditions. In clinical psychology for example, education necessarily involves interaction with people diagnosed with disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, Alzheimers's Syndrome and acquired neurogenic disorders such as aphasia and amnesia. In practice, however, clinical contact is limited by the availability of suitable patients, ethical considerations and logistical problems. One solution is to provide access to an interactive, multimedia database where students can observe exerpts from interviews and conversations which have been edited and shaped for their use.

The CAUT team is developing a computer program to manage the acquisition, storage and retrieval of video cameos of natural and laboratory scenes depicting patients and their symptoms, and use a Case-Based Reasoning system to guide student access to the database. The project team has also developed a suite of interfaces to facilitate student interaction with the database. For example, one interface will take the form of a case 'pantheon'. Faces corresponding to the cases in the database will be presented on the screen, and the user will be able to (a) click on a face to gain access to that patient's symptoms, history and diagnosis; (b) move the faces around according to their similarity to provide input into a multi-dimensional scaling package, so that students can compare their understanding of a given 'space' (for example fluency and intelligibility disorders) with that of experts; and (c) classify new cases to provide a procedure for measuring the generalisation of their diagnostic skills to new cases.

The product of the CAUT project will be used in clinical training in psychology and speech science, and, in a subsequent project, for research in to the relationship between the representation of rules and instances. The CAUT project involves a novel interaction between theory and practice. It is an application of the theoretical understanding of learning, memory, expertise and interface design to the development of instruction techniques for professional training.