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What’s so good about placement learning?

Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor Luntley;
michael.luntley@warwick.ac.uk

Keywords: expertise; placement learning; experiential knowledge

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Placement learning seems a good thing. It’s where you pick up all the things they didn’t and couldn’t teach you in medical school. It’s where you finally learn what you need to learn to acquire expertise in your chosen field. Expertise requires not only the knowledge found in medical textbooks and disseminated in lecture halls, it requires experiential knowledge. This is the knowledge that is distinctive of professional expertise. It is difficult to articulate and relies as much on intuition as following explicit rules. And that’s why some of what you learn on placement is stuff they couldn’t teach you in medical school, for it cannot be abstracted from the contingencies of practice.

The concept of experiential knowledge gives a satisfying explanation of why placement learning is a good thing. But the idea is problematic. There are conflicting intuitions about it. First, it is knowledge that is embedded . . . [Full text of this article]