3/3/08 - Dr. Glen Tamura & Journal Club

On Monday, 3/3/08, Glen Tamura, one of the UW Colleges faculty members, presented on his research project, Evaluation of Student Case Reports, focusing on the reliability of faculty physician assessments of medical student write-ups. His purpose is to evaluate the performance of faculty as teachers, assessing feedback that faculty give to students on their writeups (on what write-up sections do faculty members comment? what types of errors do they focus on? were comments mostly positive or negative? were they specifically constructive or general? is there consistency between faculty members?). He reviewed the literature for us on previous research in this area (there hasn't been much -- but all report wide variabilty among physicians when critiquing/grading write-ups).
He then reviewed his ongoing project, in which he crafted 3 "student" write-ups to include common errors. He is in the process of having each College faculty member (there are 30; including ongoing/experienced and new faculty) comment and give a final evaluation grade for the write-up. His hypothesis is that the ongoing College faculty more reliably assess write-ups when compared to new College faculty. He would like to extend this project to clerkship faculty who teach in the third year.

The group had a great discussion and provided some ideas and feedback to Dr.Tamura on the research question, methods, ways encourage participation by both College faculty and clerkship faculty. Overall, felt to be a worthy, fascinating research effort which should bring much needed attention to the area of teacher training and quality of feedback in medicine.
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We then moved on to a mini-journal club discussion (Baernstein A, Liss HK, Carney PA, Elmore JG. Trends in Study Methods Used in Undergraduate Medical Education Research, 1969-2007. JAMA 2007;298(9):1038-1045). We primarily focused our discussion on the mix of study designs (high percentage of studies without a comparison group; impressed by how many researchers were able to conduct randomized control trials in medical education settings).


We discussed the challenges to conducting medical education research (including funding, difficulty securing a 'control' group, focus on interventions but not on collecting pre-data, and opening up clear pathways of communication for researchers to utilize the expertise of faculty members in the Dept of Medical Education when considering an intervention, or research on it).
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Thanks for a great discussion, and looking forward to seeing you all next month! Our next forum is Monday 4/7/2008 from 12:00-1:15pm in South Campus Center 303. Dr. Lynne Robins in the Dept of Med Ed will be presenting on the Teaching Scholars program.