Leading team:
- Dr. Michal Haskel Ittah
- Ilya Breslavskiy
- Abigail London
Project team:
- Ilana Dubovi, Tel Aviv University
Brief
This project examines how cancer patients learn to manage their disease and treatment-related symptoms outside clinical settings. We focus on the epistemic goals that guide patients’ information seeking, particularly goals related to understanding causal relationships and mechanisms, such as why symptoms occur, how treatments work, and what factors influence outcomes. We investigate how these causal goals interact with other goals, including emotional needs, uncertainty reduction, and decision making, and how patients learn within an educational intervention designed to support disease management.
By studying a context in which individuals’ health depends heavily on their ability to access, evaluate, and use scientific information, we aim to better understand how people engage with causal scientific knowledge in real-world situations, what supports effective learning and reasoning, and what obstacles they encounter. Insights from this research can inform the design of science education that prepares learners to engage productively with scientific information throughout their lives.