Real-Life Learning Projects Considered &9 there will be some text to read and some questions to answer to make sure that you have read the text. Personally, I doubt that one could learn much about any of these subjects by oneself in 8 hours (or even 8 days.) Clearly, they are teaching vocabulary and a few facts. Most of it will be forgotten. Now suppose the insurance industry had come to me and asked my company to build a course that covered these topics. What would I say? (Apart from: Are you nuts?—not in 8 hours.) I would start by asking what is hard about insurance adjusting. At the same time, I would have already assumed that this was basically a diagnosis task. Diagnosis is a complex cognitive process that has three important parts. The most important part is the end result. All successful diagno- ses result in an answer (cancer, stopped up sewer line, misfiring spark plug, paranoia, etc.). These results are taken from a list of acceptable answers and typically are not in any way inventive. The second part is the case. A prototypical case for all possible results typically is com- pared with the current case. A match determines the result. The third part is the evidence. To construct a case, one must gather evidence. When more than one prototypical case matches the situation, more evidence needs to be gathered in order to differentiate the cases that might match. Doctors call this differential diagnosis. How does one learn to do diagnosis? One must know the pro- totypical case, which often takes years for one to acquire naturally through experience. One must know how to gather evidence, and what constitutes evidence, and one must know the possible set of re- sults. All of this takes a long time to learn. But the process itself is very much the same no matter what you are diagnosing. So, one question we would ask was whether the students in the course had any experi- ence diagnosing anything. It is easier to teach diagnosis to people who have done it before