Information and action in professional decision‐making

In this paper I shall try to explore problems in translating information into practical action. My examples are drawn from education, but my wider concern is with the take‐up of information in the professional domain. By this I mean information which is relevant to the quality of professional decision‐making processes, and especially where those decisions affect or determine interaction with other individuals—be they clients, patients, students, fellow‐professionals or employees. In an industrial context, the information would be relevant to management styles or industrial relations rather than to a new technological process. In a medical context, it would be relevant to patient‐doctor relationships, but not to the nature of symptoms or the kinds of drugs to be prescribed. In education, it would concern not the content of a new examination syllabus or the applicability of a test of performance, but a teacher's curricular goals and teaching strategies.