Open AccessLessons Learned from a Writing to Learn Program for Public Health Students at the University of Tokyo
Author(s) -
Tsuyoshi Okuhara,
Hiroko Okada,
Takahiro Kiuchi
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of medical education and curricular development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2382-1205
DOI - 10.1177/23821205211032014
Subject(s) - work (physics) , psychology , power (physics) , pandemic , face (sociological concept) , public health , medical education , public relations , debiasing , mathematics education , pedagogy , covid-19 , sociology , medicine , political science , social psychology , engineering , nursing , social science , mechanical engineering , physics , disease , quantum mechanics , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty)
We have taught writing for public health to students completing a Master of Public Health since 2016 in Japan. We adopted a writing-to-learn approach and assigned work to students to write health materials that encourage recipients to perform health behaviors (eg, drafting a poster to encourage lay audiences to adopt preventive behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic). We collected students’ work assignments and products from 2016 to 2020 and reviewed them to identify distinctive trends common to all years. We found that there was a curse of knowledge (ie, difficulties to imagine the state of mind of not knowing when knowing something) among students. Students strongly embraced the adage “knowledge is power” and underestimated the difficulties lay audiences face. Their writing was somewhat dogmatic, whereby experts imparted privileged knowledge to ignorant non-experts. However, it is well known that merely imparting knowledge often does not work to educate lay audiences about making better decisions. Debiasing this curse of knowledge among students will be the main target of our writing education.