Improving Medical Education Through Targeted Coaching

Finding the Needle in the Haystack: Can Natural Language Processing of Students' Evaluations of Teachers Identify Teaching Concerns?

BACKGROUND

Institutions rely on student evaluations of teaching (SET) to ascertain teaching quality. Manual review of narrative comments can identify faculty with teaching concerns but can be resource and time-intensive.

AIM

To determine if natural language processing (NLP) of SET comments completed by learners on clinical rotations can identify teaching quality concerns.

SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS

Single institution retrospective cohort analysis of SET (n = 11,850) from clinical rotations between July 1, 2017, and June 30, 2018.

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

The performance of three NLP dictionaries created by the research team was compared to an off-the-shelf Sentiment Dictionary.

PROGRAM EVALUATION

The Expert Dictionary had an accuracy of 0.90, a precision of 0.62, and a recall of 0.50. The Qualifier Dictionary had lower accuracy (0.65) and precision (0.16) but similar recall (0.67). The Text Mining Dictionary had an accuracy of 0.78 and a recall of 0.24. The Sentiment plus Qualifier Dictionary had good accuracy (0.86) and recall (0.77) with a precision of 0.37.

DISCUSSION

NLP methods can identify teaching quality concerns with good accuracy and reasonable recall, but relatively low precision. An existing, free, NLP sentiment analysis dictionary can perform nearly as well as dictionaries requiring expert coding or manual creation.

A continuing professional development imperative? Examining trends and characteristics of health professions education doctoral programs

BACKGROUND

Despite the long-standing faculty development initiatives for improving teaching skills in the health professions, there is still a growing need for educators who are formally trained in educational theory and practice as health professions schools experience dramatic demand and growth. Graduate programs in health professions education (HPE) provide an avenue for health professions' faculty continuing professional development to enhance their knowledge and skills for teaching and curriculum leadership roles. There has been a proliferation of certificate, master's, and doctoral programs in HPE over the last two decades to respond to the growing need for well-prepared faculty educators and program leadership. The purpose of this study was to identify and describe current HPE doctoral programs in United States (U.S.) and Canada.

METHODS

The study first examined doctoral programs in HPE identified in earlier studies. Next, we searched the literature and the web to identify new doctoral programs in the U.S. and Canada that had been established between 2014, when the prior study was conducted, and 2022. We then collated and described the characteristics of these programs, highlighting their similarities and differences.

RESULTS

We identified a total of 20 doctoral programs, 17 in the U.S. and 3 in Canada. Of these, 12 programs in the U.S. and 1 program in Canada were established in the last 8 years. There are many similarities and some notable differences across programs with respect to degree title, admission requirements, duration, delivery format, curriculum, and graduation requirements. Most programs are delivered in a hybrid format and the average time for completion is 4 years.

CONCLUSIONS

The workforce shortage facing health professional schools presents an opportunity, or perhaps imperative, for continuing professional development in HPE through certificate, master's, or doctoral programs. With the current exponential growth of new doctoral programs, there is a need to standardize the title, degree requirements, and further develop core competencies that guide the knowledge and skills HPE graduates are expected to have upon graduation.

Community, Coaching, and Action Research: Promoting Ambitious Teaching in Medical Education

Ambitious teaching is an instructional approach enacted through central tasks of teaching that involves a fundamental shift in mindset and practice. In this approach, the teacher facilitates student learning in the context of authentic, interactive experiences by eliciting student thinking and adapting instruction accordingly. We designed the Medical Educator-Excellence in Teaching (MEET) program to promote ambitious teaching in medical education. Here, we describe the structure of MEET, the framework that informed our work, and program evaluation data. We propose MEET as a model of educator development that promotes ambitious teaching through development of educator community, focused coaching, and inquiry into practice.

Medical education and training within congenital cardiology: current global status and future directions in a post COVID-19 world

Despite enormous strides in our field with respect to patient care, there has been surprisingly limited dialogue on how to train and educate the next generation of congenital cardiologists. This paper reviews the current status of training and evolving developments in medical education pertinent to congenital cardiology. The adoption of competency-based medical education has been lauded as a robust framework for contemporary medical education over the last two decades. However, inconsistencies in frameworks across different jurisdictions remain, and bridging gaps between competency frameworks and clinical practice has proved challenging. Entrustable professional activities have been proposed as a solution, but integration of such activities into busy clinical cardiology practices will present its own challenges. Consequently, this pivot towards a more structured approach to medical education necessitates the widespread availability of appropriately trained medical educationalists, a development that will better inform curriculum development, instructional design, and assessment. Differentiation between superficial and deep learning, the vital role of rich formative feedback and coaching, should guide our trainees to become self-regulated learners, capable of critical reasoning yet retaining an awareness of uncertainty and ambiguity. Furthermore, disruptive innovations such as "technology enhanced learning" may be leveraged to improve education, especially for trainees from low- and middle-income countries. Each of these initiatives will require resources, widespread advocacy and raised awareness, and publication of supporting data, and so it is especially gratifying that Cardiology in the Young has fostered a progressive approach, agreeing to publish one or two articles in each journal issue in this domain.

A Call for Curriculum and Faculty Developers to Attend to Ambitious Teaching in Experiential Curriculum

To realize the goals of an experiential curriculum, medical educators need support to enact a different kind of teaching: ambitious teaching. Ambitious teaching promotes curricular aims and fosters responsive, interactive environments to elicit student thinking and facilitate student-to-student discussion of clinical concepts and reasoning. The purpose of this article is to provide a framework for ambitious teaching that can be used to meet the complex challenges of experiential learning. Specifically, we describe the ways in which medical education curriculum and faculty developers can support ambitious teaching and, ultimately, enhance curricular outcomes.