Understanding and Interaction in Clinical and Educational Settings examines the interplay of interaction, reasoning, setting, and culture that affects the production of understandings. Analyzing and comparing the activities, information resources and constraints that shape understandings in clinics and classrooms, the author explains the components of routine organizational activities that enhance or limit understanding. He shows how explanations intended to produce knowledge may also mobilize aspects of professional culture that limit its scope and use. Such explanatory strategies can produce interpretive contingencies that complicate understanding of medical information or scientific concepts. Understanding and Interaction in Clinical and Educational Settings explains how changes in the use of information resources can improve understandings by shifting the balance of participants' interpretive contingencies during explanatory interactions and changing professional culture.