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This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Interdisciplinary Health Team Care Conference, which took place September 26-28, 1985 in Chicago, Illinois.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

The study of attitudes of students in interprofessional education requires some background first about the nature of interprofessional education and second about the nature of attitude formation and change. The basic concepts for this study are derived from educational and social psychological theories that give direction for understanding the nature of the learner, the learning process In attitude change, the content of interprofessional education, and the Interprofessional group as the context of attitude formation and change.

Interprofessional education and practice groups have received little attention in research in group theory and practice, and the few studies devoted to interdisciplinary teams; have yielded tenuous results. McCorcle has suggested that interdisciplinary task teams differ in two important ways from the kinds of groups most often studied (1982). First, the interdisciplinary task group is an open rather than a closed system owing its existence to some outside agent who places unpredictable requirements on the group. The group, therefore, will be expected to engage in various activities to respond to interactions within this larger environment. Second, production schedules and commitments to outside agents emphasize the time boundaries of the group. The behavior of the group will be influenced by an emphasis on task requirements. These two characteristics, openness of group boundaries and the needs of the group to attend to the task requirement, present a dilemma for the interprofessional group.