Social cognitive theory: Thinking and learning in social settings

In this chapter, the authors describe selected social cognitive theories (SCTs) that they believe apply to health professions education today. SCTs argue that the uniqueness that each situation brings can often lead to different learning and performance experiences and outcomes. The authors discuss five different theoretical lenses that fall within the family of SCTs: situated cognition, distributed cognition, ecological psychology, situated learning and landscapes of practice. When Bandura championed SCT, behaviouralism was arguably the prevailing theory of learning. A communities of practice framework may provide a useful lens to facilitating performance in complex systems such as residency and fellowship education, which are made of many interconnected parts. The authors provide some of the applications of these theories, and indicate future research and practice directions. Future research may focus on deepening our understanding of what and how sociocultural factors play a role in the cognitive processes that affect learning, teaching and performance in the healthcare professions.