The complexity of medical education: Social identity and normative influence in well-being and approaches to learning

In examining educational processes, researchers often seek to provide general models that can be applied in a broad range of learning contexts. While this is a useful pursuit, the current chapter addresses some of the problems inherent in this approach. We investigate the specific context of medical education to demon­strate that the application of general models of education may, at times, be complex. Medical education is often treated as a special case in tertiary education. This is because it differs from other disciplines in terms of the breadth of content to be covered, the ways in which the content is taught and the social norms that are prevalent in the medical education setting. These differences mean that commonly used educational processes and models may produce counter ­intuitive outcomes in the context of medical education. The current chapter focuses on two broad types of outcomes: student well­-being and student learning. These outcomes are the subject of much debate in medical education and represent concrete examples of areas in which educational models do not apply in the manner we might expect. Our current examination of medical education demon­strates the importance of considering specific contextual complexities and social influence processes in applying general educational models.