Rapidly assessing how ill a patient is based on their immediate presentation—colloquially termed ‘eyeballing’ in practice—serves a vital role in acute care settings. Yet surprisingly little is known about how this diagnostic skill is learned or how it should be taught. Some authors have pointed to a dual-process model, suggesting that assessments of illness severity are driven by two distinct types

Despite a variety of definitions of mindfulness, over the past 20 years there have been increasing claims that mindful practice is helpful in improving the accuracy of clinical diagnosis. We performed a systematic review and evidence synthesis in order to: determine the nature and definitions of mindful practice and associated terms; evaluate the quality of evidence for the benefits of mindful practice;

Spaced education is a learning strategy to improve knowledge acquisition and retention. To date, no robust evidence exists to support the utility of spaced education in the Family Medicine residency. We aimed to test whether alerts to encourage spaced education can improve clinical knowledge as measured by scores on the Canadian Family Medicine certification examination. Method: We conducted a cluster

Practice-based interprofessional education (IPE), a key feature in developing a collaboration-ready workforce, is poorly integrated in healthcare curriculums. This study aimed to synthesise educator perspectives on implementing practice-based IPE and develop recommendations to inform sustainable practice-based IPE. An ethnographic case study was carried out at a school of allied health. Data collection

Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) have become ubiquitous as a form of assessment in medical education but involve substantial resource demands and considerable local variation. A detailed understanding of the processes by which OSCEs are designed and administered could improve feasibility and sustainability. This exploration of OSCE design is informed by Practice Theory, which suggests

Handover between colleagues is a complex task. The problem is that handovers are often inadequate because they are not structured according to theoretically grounded guidelines. Based on the cognitive load theory, we suggest that allowing a clarifying dialogue and thereby optimizing germane cognitive load enhances the information quality and diagnostic accuracy at handover, but may prolong handover

The paper reviews 50 years of research in health sciences education and identifies several recurring controversies—formative versus summative assessment, high and low fidelity simulation, expertise as knowledge versus skills, and the impact of teaching versus curriculum. I then look at the role these may play in the current situation where COVID has necessitated rapid change to distance learning. I

In this article, the contributions of cognitive psychology to research and development of medical education are assessed. The cognitive psychology of learning consists of activation of prior knowledge while processing new information and elaboration on the resulting new knowledge to facilitate storing in long-term memory. This process is limited by the size of working memory. Six interventions based

Health professions education is that part of the education system which applies educational philosophy, theory, principles and practice in a complex relationship with busy clinical services, where education is not the primary role. While the goals are clear—to produce the health workforce that society needs to improve health outcomes—both education and healthcare systems continue to evolve concurrently

Advances in Health Sciences Education (AHSE) has been at the forefront of the cognitive wave in health professions education for the past 25 years. One example is research on productive failure, a teaching strategy that asks learners to attempt to generate solutions to difficult problems before receiving instruction. This study compared the effectiveness of productive failure with indirect failure

The field of health professions education research draws inspiration from many disciplines, creating a dynamic socio-cultural context that is replete with contests over research rigour and quality. These knowledge politics are never definitively resolved. Thus, an important question that any graduate program established within the field has to contend with is what should constitute expertise in HPER

Data science is an inter-disciplinary field that uses computer-based algorithms and methods to gain insights from large and often complex datasets. Data science, which includes Artificial Intelligence techniques such as Machine Learning (ML), has been credited with the promise to transform Health Professions Education (HPE) by offering approaches to handle big (and often messy) data. To examine this

Every choice we make in health professions education has a cost, whether it be financial or otherwise; by choosing one action (e.g., integrating more simulation, studying more for a summative examination) we lose the opportunity to take an alternative action (e.g., freeing up time for other teaching, leisure time). Economics significantly shapes the way we behave and think as educators and learners

Health professions education (HPE) is built on a structural foundation of modernity based on Eurocentric epistemologies. This foundation privileges certain forms of evidence and ways of knowing and is implicated in how dominant models of HPE curricula and healthcare practice position concepts of knowledge, equity, and social justice. This invited perspectives paper frames this contemporary HPE as the

The journal Advances in Health Sciences Education: Theory and Practice has, under Geoff Norman’s leadership, promoted a collaborative approach to investigating educationally-savvy and innovative health care practices, where academic medical educators can work closely with healthcare practitioners to improve patient care and safety. But in medical practice in particular this networked approach is often

The contexts and methods for communicating in healthcare and health professions education (HPE) profoundly affect how we understand information, relate to others, and construct our identities. Multimodal analysis provides a method for exploring how we communicate using multiple modes—e.g., language, gestures, images—in concert with each other and within specific contexts. In this paper, we demonstrate

The way quality of assessment has been perceived and assured has changed considerably in the recent 5 decades. Originally, assessment was mainly seen as a measurement problem with the aim to tell people apart, the competent from the not competent. Logically, reproducibility or reliability and construct validity were seen as necessary and sufficient for assessment quality and the role of human judgement

The current study used theories on expertise development (the holistic model of image perception and the information reduction hypothesis) as a starting point to identify and explore potentially relevant process measures to monitor and evaluate expertise development in radiology residency training. It is the first to examine expertise development in volumetric image interpretation (i.e., CT scans)

The use of walking workstations in educational and work settings has been shown to improve cognitive abilities. At the same time, it has been repeatedly shown that medical residents around the world do not meet exercise guidelines, mainly due to a scarcity of available free time. Our study investigates the boundaries of the previously observed phenomenon of improved cognitive performance with physical

Medical education is a rapidly growing field of research, incorporating diverse disciplinary perspectives to assist physician trainees in developing the complex skills needed for practice. Education science is happening in many medical specialties; however, Family Medicine or General Practice settings have not seen a proportional share of theory-driven education research. The limited nature of education

Off-the-job faculty development for clinical teachers has been blighted by poor attendance, unsatisfactory sustainability, and weak impact. The faculty development literature has attributed these problems to the marginalisation of the clinical teacher role in host institutions. By focusing on macro-organisational factors, faculty development is ignoring the how clinical teachers are shaped by their

Although rhetoric abounds about the importance of patient-, person- and relationship-centered approaches to health care, little is known about how to address the problem of dehumanization through medical and health professions education. One promising but under-theorized strategy is to co-produce education in collaboration with health service users. To this end, we co-produced a longitudinal course

Variation in examiner stringency is an ongoing problem in many performance settings such as in OSCEs, and usually is conceptualised and measured based on scores/grades examiners award. Under borderline regression, the standard within a station is set using checklist/domain scores and global grades acting in combination. This complexity requires a more nuanced view of what stringency might mean when

The diversity of modern society is often not represented in the medical workforce. This might be partly due to selection practices. We need to better understand decision-making processes by selection committees in order to improve selection procedures with regard to diversity. This paper reports on a qualitative study with a socio-constructivist perspective conducted in 2015 that explored how residency

Theoretical understanding of what motivates clinician researchers has met with some success in launching research careers, but it does not account for professional identification as a factor determining sustained research engagement over the long-term. Deeper understanding of clinicians’ research-related motivation may better foster their sustained research engagement post-training and, by extension

Australian general practice trainees typically consult with patients from their first week of training, seeking in-consultation supervisory assistance only when not sufficiently confident to complete patient consultations independently. Trainee help-seeking plays a key role in supervisor oversight of trainee consultations. This study used focus groups and interviews with general practice supervisors

In Canada, high stakes objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) administered by the Medical Council of Canada have relied exclusively on physician examiners (PEs) for scoring. Prior research has looked at using SPs to replace PEs. This paper reports on two studies that implement and evaluate a standardized patient (SP) scoring tool to augment PE scoring. The unique aspect of this study is

Medical schools worldwide undertake widening access (WA) initiatives (e.g. pipeline, outreach and academic enrichment programmes) to support pupils from high schools which do not traditionally send high numbers of applicants to medicine. UK literature indicates that pupils in these schools feel that their teachers are ill-equipped, cautious or even discouraging towards their aspiration and/or application

Health professionals’ roles and scopes often overlap, creating a need for role clarity in interprofessional teamwork. Yet, such clarity does not mean roles are fixed within teams and some literature suggests role flexibility can enhance team functioning. Interprofessional practice competencies and learning activities often emphasize knowledge and definition of roles, but rarely attend to the dynamic

The medical education (Med Ed) research community characterises itself as drawing on the insights, methods, and knowledge from multiple disciplines and research domains (e.g. Sociology, Anthropology, Education, Humanities, Psychology). This common view of Med Ed research is echoed and reinforced by the narrative used by leading Med Ed departments and research centres to describe their activities as

The physical therapy profession in the United States suffers from a shortage of providers of color. This is unlikely to change with newly graduating students, as 2.6% of 2017 graduates were African American and 5.7% were Hispanic or Latino. Faculty mentorship has a more profound influence on the retention of underrepresented minority students as compared with students from privileged backgrounds, according

Learner handover (LH), the process of sharing of information about learners between faculty supervisors, allows for longitudinal assessment fundamental in the competency-based education model. However, the potential to bias future assessments has been raised as a concern. The purpose of this study is to determine whether prior performance information such as LH influences the assessment of learners

Professional identity formation (PIF) is considered a key process in physician development. However, early PIF research may have inadvertently left out experiences from ethnically/racially minoritized physicians. As a result, the PIF literature may have forwarded dominant perspectives and assumptions about PIF that does not reflect those of minoritized physicians. This study used a cross-sectional

Global medical education is dominated by a Northern tilt. Global universities’ faculty and students dominate research, scholarship and teaching about what is termed global education. This tilt has been fixed in global biomedical education with some acknowledgement from the Global South of the comparative benefits of global exchange. Student exchange is predominantly North to South. Students from the

In dental medicine, interpreting radiographs (i.e., orthopantomograms, OPTs) is an error-prone process, even in experts. Effective intervention methods are therefore needed to support students in improving their image reading skills for OPTs. To this end, we developed a compare-and-contrast intervention, which aimed at supporting students in achieving full coverage when visually inspecting OPTs and

The growing emphasis on learning with and from patients has shifted the focus from education and healthcare professionals to the student–patient relationship. The relationship between student and patient, with a supportive preceptor as a resource, can influence the progression and development of an authentic person-centred approach to care among students. The purpose of this study was to analyse the

Surgeons practice their own variations on a procedure. Residents experience shifting thresholds between variations that one surgeon holds firmly as principle and another takes more lightly as preference. Such variability has implications for surgical education, but the impact is not well understood. This is a critical problem to investigate as programs seek to define procedures for competency-based

Tolerance of uncertainty, a construct describing individuals’ responses to perceived uncertainty, has relevancy across healthcare systems, yet little work explores the impact of education on medical students’ tolerance of uncertainty. While debate remains as to whether tolerance of uncertainty is changeable or static, the prevailing conceptual healthcare tolerance of uncertainty model (Hillen et al

When determining the score given to candidates in multiple mini-interview (MMI) stations, raters have to translate a narrative judgment to an ordinal rating scale. When adding individual scores to calculate final ranking, it is generally presumed that the values of possible scores on the evaluation grid are separated by constant intervals, following a linear function, although this assumption is seldom

Education in implementation science, which involves the training of health professionals in how to implement evidence-based findings into health practice systematically, has become a highly relevant topic in health sciences education. The present study advances education in implementation science by compiling a competence profile for implementation practice and research and by exploring implementation

Many processes and practices in the field of health professions education have been based more on tradition and assumption than on evidence and theory. As the field matures, researchers are increasingly seeking evidence to support various teaching and assessment methods. However, there is a tendency to focus on a limited set of topics, leaving other areas under-examined and limiting our understanding

Models for diagnostic reasoning in radiology have been based on the observed behaviors of experienced radiologists but have not directly focused on the thought processes of novices as they improve their accuracy of image interpretation. By collecting think-aloud verbal reports, the current study was designed to investigate differences in specific thought processes between medical students (novices)

For nearly four decades, researchers have explored the integration of arts and humanities content into health professions education (HPE). However, enduring controversies regarding the purpose, efficacy, and implementation of humanities initiatives suggest that the timing and context of trainees’ exposure to such content is a key, but seldom considered, factor. To better understand the affordances

Empathy remains a widely discussed topic within medical education research. Studies on empathy changes among medical students are not univocal: empathy may decline, remain stable or increase. A largely unexplored research question regards inter-individual variability in empathy change, namely if different longitudinal trajectories of empathy exist. Evidence on the association of empathy trajectories

There has been increased attention to and emphasis on competency-based medical education and the transformation from highly supervised medical students towards independent, entrustable physicians. We explored how program directors (PDs) justify decisions about whether they would trust finishing Post Graduate Year 1 (PGY1) residents to care for the PD or a loved one. Using an end of year survey with

A recent editorial by Norman (2019) in this journal asked whether “[t]wo heads are better than one”. Following a light-hearted and insightful deliberation on medical training specifically and problem solving in general, either individually or in groups, Norman concluded that “two (independent) heads are better than one (group of two heads)” (2019). We applaud the author for questioning a widely accepted

When educators are developing an effective and workable assessment program in graduate medical education by employing action research and stakeholder mapping to identify core competency domains and directives, the multi-stage process can be guided and informed by utilizing the story of designing, building and sea-testing sailing ships as a metaphor. However, the current challenge of physician burnout

Teaching clinical reasoning in emergency medicine requires educators to foster diagnostic accuracy and judicious decision-making amidst chaotic ambient factors including clinician fatigue, high cognitive load, and diverse patient expectations. The current study applies the early work of Jurgen Habermas and his knowledge-constitutive interests as a lens to explore an educational approach where physician-educators

Undergraduate clinical assessors make expert, multifaceted judgements of consultation skills in concert with medical school OSCE grading rubrics. Assessors are not cognitive machines: their judgements are made in the light of prior experience and social interactions with students. It is important to understand assessors’ working conceptualisations of consultation skills and whether they could be used

We conducted a study to compare medical school experiences, values, career paths, and career satisfaction of under-represented in medicine (URiM) and non-URiM physicians approximately 15 years after medical school, guided by the Theory of Planned Behavior and the concept of stereotype threat. The sample consisted of four graduating classes, 1996–1999, of Harvard Medical School, 20% of whom were URiM

Healthcare graduates are often characterised as ill-prepared for workplace entry. Historically, research on health professional’s work preparedness has focused on the quality of graduates’ clinical knowledge, skills and problem-solving. This ignores the role of professional identity formation in determining readiness for clinical practice. Yet, professional identity defines graduate self-perception

Medical students’ motivations for choosing a medical career are likely based on and remain tethered to the affectively-laden caring component of doctor–patient interactions. However, this component is rarely presented in educational surgical videos. It is unknown whether affectively engaging students by including patient-related emotionally salient information potentiates or draws focus away from learning

Transitioning from student to doctor is notoriously challenging. Newly qualified doctors feel required to make decisions before owning their new identity. It is essential to understand how responsibility relates to identity formation to improve transitions for doctors and patients. This multiphase ethnographic study explores realities of transition through anticipatory, lived and reflective stages

Aspiring medical educators and their advisors often lack clarity about career paths. To provide guidance to faculty pursuing careers as educators, we sought to explore perceived factors that contributed to the career development of outstanding medical educators. Using a thematic analysis, investigators at two institutions interviewed 39 full or associate professor physician faculty with prominent roles

Educators, practitioners, and policy makers are calling for stronger connections between continuing education (CE) for professionals and the concerns of workplaces where these professionals work. This call for greater alignment is not unique to the health professions. Researchers within the field of higher education have long wrestled with the complexities of aligning professional learning and workplace

Interprofessional education (IPE) and entrustable professional activities (EPAs) represent two topics in health professions education that have attracted significant attention in recent years. IPE (when different health professionals learn with, from and about each other with the aim of optimal care) has an inherent focus on the collective. EPAs (units of professional practice that can be fully entrusted

Competency-based medical education and programmatic assessment intend to increase the opportunities for meaningful feedback, yet these conversations remain elusive. By comparing resident and faculty perceptions of feedback opportunities within one internal medicine residency training program, we sought to understand whether and how principles underlying meaningful feedback could be supported or constrained

Competency frameworks serve various roles including outlining characteristics of a competent workforce, facilitating mobility, and analysing or assessing expertise. Given these roles and their relevance in the health professions, we sought to understand the methods and strategies used in the development of existing competency frameworks. We applied the Arksey and O’Malley framework to undertake this

There is a special category of mentor: the person who supports you as much as they support your career. They offer a unique relationship that is rich and powerful. Researchers have tried to better understand this relationship and the other varieties of mentoring relationships. But there is a significant gap in that research: we don’t talk about the experience of the sudden loss of a mentor. Sometimes

In the past 50 years, the original McMaster PBL model has been implemented, experimented, revised, and modified, and is still evolving. Yet, the development of PBL is not a series of success stories, but rather a journey of experiments, failures and lessons learned. In this paper, we analyzed the meta-analyses and systematic reviews on PBL from 1992 to present as they provide a focused lens on the