Paper Abstract
"Many real-world questions that professionals face occur in complex, dynamic environments where information is often sparse, e.g., clinical decision-making, cyber security, stock market prediction. In many cases, problems are open-ended without a single or optimal solution. Providing effective training in these ill-defined environments presents an important challenge for educators. Using the healthcare professions as a case study, this chapter outlines a framework for knowledge acquisition in the professions. It argues that dynamic, adaptive criteria must be identified based on educational theory, psychometric techniques, and properties of expert performance. From this approach, educators must develop assessment criteria that satisfice, framing problems in terms of an order of difficulty relative to the learner’s current level of comprehension. This reflects a quantitative approach to the zone-of-proximal development (ZPD), that removes the upper-bound for knowledge acquisition. In health professions education, this approach can be used to create a competency profile. Finally, given that professional practices often focus on the efficient use of resources, I argue that measures of the speed-accuracy trade-off should be used to assess expert performance."

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