M. L. J. Abercrombie - Research

Research

Abercrombie investigated why medical students who were able to solve problems, when presented in a familiar format, were unable to do so when the same problems were presented in a slightly different way. Abercrombie (1969) reminds us that we rarely reflect upon our initial judgements, which are embedded in our own personality. Abercrombie found that group discussion helped these students solve such problems and, in particular, improved the ability of the students to discriminate between facts and opinions, to resist false conclusions and to bring fresh strategies to their attempts to solve new problems without being adversely influenced by past failure. The ideas put forward by Jane Abercrombie about the development of small group interactive learning pedagogies in the 1960s in the UK had an almost immediate impact on the primary and tertiary education sectors there. Her Anatomy of Judgement: an investigation into the process of perception and reasoning culminated ten years of research on the selection and training of medical students at University College, University of London. This research suggested that the art of medical judgement, diagnosis and other key elements of medical practice, were better learned in small groups of students arriving at a diagnosis collaboratively than by students working individually. Her finding is that group discussion, properly directed, can do much to eliminate faults in the teacher and to make the student think instead of learning.