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 The Academy Center for Teaching and Learning invites faculty to alert us to publication of their work describing innovations in medical education, research studies, or new educational products. Link to Ecommons Log on Page Harvard Medical students’ attendance at lectures has decreased with the advent of technology that allows them to view videotaped lectures at 2.5 times the speed of live lectures. A recent study at HMS – Cardall S, Krupat E, Ulrich M. Live lecture versus video-recorded lecture: are students voting with their feet? Acad Med. 2008;83:1174-8 – sheds new light on students’ behaviors and attitudes toward lectures. Students reported reasons why they did and did not attend live lectures. The data suggest that students believe that they can attain the content more quickly and efficiently by watching the lecture on tape. Moreover, when lectures are relevant and easier to understand, students can watch them even more quickly, sometimes watching multiple lectures in one day. Students who do attend lectures rarely do so to converse with faculty or to ask questions. The authors infer from their findings that if lectures offer more than knowledge transmission, say something interactive that requires one’s presence to get full benefit, then students would attend. From the perspective of the Academy Center for Teaching and Learning, these data suggest the importance of training faculty to present clear and relevant lectures that can stand alone as instructional tools that also engage students in activities such as analysis, synthesis or critical thinking. ____________________________________________________________ The April and May issues of Academic Medicine feature articles describing important curricular initiatives at Harvard Medical School. In April, Finkelstein and colleagues described a first-year course, Clinical Epidemiology and Population Health. This course represents new content for medical students – content that represents changing perspectives in health care, namely a desire to develop a “workforce of physicians who embrace their responsibility to improve the health of the population as a whole, as well as the health of the patient in front of them.” (Finkelstein JA, McMahon GT, Peters AS, Cadigan R, Biddinger P, Simon SR. Teaching population health as a basic science at Harvard Medical School. Acad Med. 2008;83:332-7.) In May, Bell and colleagues evaluated the effectiveness of a pilot Principal Clinical Experience (PCE), Harvard’s newly designed “Year III” clerkships. Of interest, the PCE directors not only changed the structure and content of the curriculum, but consciously exposed the hidden curriculum. The result was that students in the pilot program retained patient-centered attitudes to a greater extent than their peers in the traditional clerkships. (Bell SK, Krupat E, Fazio SB, Roberts DH, Schwartzstein RM. Longitudinal pedagogy: a successful response to the fragmentation of the third-year medical student clerkship experience. Acad Med. 2008;83:467-75.) When faced with integrating new content into an existing curriculum – as often recommended by policy makers and accrediting bodies – an institution may find that it lacks sufficient expertise among its faculty to succeed. Such a situation arose in many residency programs when the ACGME mandated six competencies, including systems-based practice (SBP) and practice-based learning and improvement (PBLI). To overcome this problem, Dr. Gordon Moore and colleagues in the Department of Ambulatory Care & Prevention developed a web-based curriculum, Achieving Competence Today (ACT), that residents could use to guide a one-month elective in SBP/PBLI. Eighteen US Internal Medicine programs, including Beth Israel-Deaconess Hospital, participated in a two-year pilot. The curriculum and its evaluation appear in Peters AS, Kimura J, Ladden MJD, March E, Moore GT. A self-instructional model to teach systems-based practice and practice-based learning and improvement. J Gen Intern Med 2008;23:931-6. |
