Paul van Schaik

Despite ubiquitous powerful technologies such as networked computers, global positioning systems, and cell phones; human failures in decision-making and performance continue to have disastrous consequences. Electronic Performance Support: Using Digital Technology to Enhance Human Ability, reminds everyone involved in education, training, human performance engineering, and related fields of the enormous importance of this area. Ironically, the more complex technology becomes, the more performance support may be needed, and that's why the extraordinary expertise shared in this book is especially valuable. The authors emphasize the psychological aspects of performance support, the fundamental limitations of human memory, perception, cognition, conation, and psychomotor skills and how they can be reduced through electronic performance support, as one of the most important pursuits of this century. Readers will find the material presented extremely useful because of its generic basis - which underlines much of the contemporary use of electronic technology for supporting people who are engaged in problem-solving activities. At the same time, the book gives examples of the application of electronic performance support in a number of specific domains. Possible future developments for electronic performance support are also discussed. The technological challenges we face today, both globally and locally, are more urgent than most people seem willing to acknowledge, and there is no time to waste putting the ideas expressed in this book into action.

Despite ubiquitous powerful technologies such as networked computers, global positioning systems, and cell phones; human failures in decision-making and performance continue to have disastrous consequences. Electronic Performance Support: Using Digital Technology to Enhance Human Ability, reminds everyone involved in education, training, human performance engineering, and related fields of the enormous importance of this area. Ironically, the more complex technology becomes, the more performance support may be needed, and that's why the extraordinary expertise shared in this book is especially valuable. The authors emphasize the psychological aspects of performance support, the fundamental limitations of human memory, perception, cognition, conation, and psychomotor skills and how they can be reduced through electronic performance support, as one of the most important pursuits of this century. Readers will find the material presented extremely useful because of its generic basis - which underlines much of the contemporary use of electronic technology for supporting people who are engaged in problem-solving activities. At the same time, the book gives examples of the application of electronic performance support in a number of specific domains. Possible future developments for electronic performance support are also discussed. The technological challenges we face today, both globally and locally, are more urgent than most people seem willing to acknowledge, and there is no time to waste putting the ideas expressed in this book into action.

This bibliography presents studies of nonmedical factors (patient, clinician, and practice variables) that influence medical decision-making. Those factors include age, gender and presentational style of the patient; age, years in practice and attitudes of the clinician; and geographical location and list size of the practice. The authors separate such factors into two cateogories. The first is decision-making in the context of general patient management, such as test-ordering, diagnoses, and treatment recommendations. The second category is decision-making in the context of referrals made by generalists to specialists. Each published study identified from an extensive literature search is presented in a structured tabular format, with a brief summary of the study features described above. The studies cited were published in years spanning 1980 to March, 2001. Researchers and clinicians, as well as graduate and postgraduate students, in all medical disciplines will find this volume of interest, as will health psychologists, health economists and social psychologists. This work integrates published research about medical decision-making that has earlier only been fragmented and spread across a variety of journals. A chapter on methodological considerations in medical decision-making research and a chapter on models of medical decision-making are included.