Adaptive learning

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Adaptive learning is where the material that a student receives, “adapts,” or changes, based on their individual performance, often in real-time.
Adaptive learning is often automated and driven by technology. In medicine, this approach can help facilitate learning with real-world problems - like a clinical issue affecting a patient.
To show how this works, let’s say there’s a medical student named Lindsay, who is part of a team of residents and nurses, and she’s taking care of a man who’s been in a car crash and has a serious head injury.
Lindsay can learn an incredible amount from caring for this patient - everything from the specifics of the medical case to issues around teamwork and communication with his family.
The first step for approaching this case is for Lindsay and her entire team to do a gap identification - to figure out what Lindsay already knows and to figure out where the gaps are.
To do that, Lindsay has to answer key questions. Like, what do I know about head trauma?
What is the family most concerned about? And what are the complications that I need to be aware of?
Each of these questions could lead Lindsay in a different direction and could take her hours to read about - oftentimes leading to more questions - like going down the rabbit hole!
But even if she doesn’t go out and answer every last one, just having a questioning attitude helps sharpen her mind and makes her a better clinician.
After making a list of questions, the next challenge is figuring out how to prioritize which ones to tackle. This is where Lindsay can use her best judgment and then get feedback from more senior folks on her team to get their guidance as well.
So, let’s assume that Lindsay does both of those things, and that she decides to learn more about or increased ICP, or intracranial pressure, - since that seems to be the main issue for her patient.
At this point comes the planning phase. Lindsay now has to figure out which resources she wants to learn from.
And the source of the information matters - she might look for a textbook if she wants to understand the specifics of how increased pressure affects blood vessels in the brain, whereas she might opt to check out a video-blog from a patient support forum if she wants to learn more about how increased intracranial pressure can make a person feel.
This step is particularly tricky because the best sources of information are ever-changing, and it’s hard for medical students as well as practising physicians and even patients to stay up-to-date.
You really have to dedicate time to do it well. Next comes the actual learning step.
Now a word of caution here - because a lot of students try to jump right in and use ineffective strategies like passively re-reading, highlighting, or cramming.
Unfortunately, these strategies don’t lead to learning that lasts. What Lindsay needs to do, is actively learn the material, so that she can remember it long-term.
Sometimes that means making a diagram or even a little drawing to help relate the various bits of information that she picks up.
She might also try creating her own practice test questions to help her study; either alone or in a group. We know that figuring out what questions to ask and how to ask them is as much a part of learning as answering them.
She could keep these questions to guide future study and review. To assess whether she really gets it, Lindsay might try to explain the information to a colleague or a senior member of her team.
The process of trying to teach that material back to someone will really solidify it and can help reveal gaps in her understanding.
Going back to our scenario, let’s say that Lindsay learns that keeping a person upright can significantly lower their intracranial pressure.
Now the final step in the adaptive learning process is for Lindsay to clinically apply what she learns - since at the end of the day, that’s what really matters.
In this case, she might find that raising the head of the bed does reduce intracranial pressure, but doing it can cause side effects as well.
The learning here comes from two directions - she sees how didactic learning actually works in a real-world setting - and she gains some experiential learning in the process.
Moreover, she can take this information with her as she moves on to take care of future patients as well. For Lindsay, adaptive learning started and ended by interacting with a real-world problem, and to succeed it takes a growth mindset - which is when a person is very open to learning new things.
The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset - which is when a person feels like their knowledge is static and they’re afraid of new challenges because they don’t want their ignorance to be discovered.
But even with a growth mindset, constantly thinking and learning in this way can be really exhausting. Think about it - when you’re already feeling overwhelmed from taking care of patients, it can be tempting to learn passively or not bother to learn at all.
Sticking to an adaptive learning approach takes tremendous resilience or grit, but it pays off in a big way for you and your patients down the road.
Alright as a quick recap - Adaptive learning is when you start with a real-world problem and then ask a set of questions, prioritize the questions you want to explore, find resources, learn about the issue, and then go back to what you’ve learned, testing to see if really works.
Learning this way takes a growth mindset and grit but really pays off!