accomplishing the tasks they perceive as necessary to succeed in the system. If we are trying to make teaching and assessment more relevant to our goals for the students, therefore, perhaps the question we should be challenging ourselves with is not what educational strategies would ideally maximize the acquisition of these goals, but rather how do we create willing partners in our students, and what do our grand educational strategies reduce to if they don’t play along? not rocket science: Rethinking research in health professions education” (Feb 1, 9:00 am, 500 University “It’s Ave., Room 303) The health professional education community has been struggling with a number of issues regarding the place and value of research in the field, including: the role of theory building vs applied research; the relative value of generalizable vs. contextually rich localized solutions; and the relative value of local vs. multi-institutional research. In part, these debates have been limited by the fact that the health professional education community has been deeply entrenched in the physical sciences as a model for research. The resulting emphasis on the goal of and control” and the attendant “ideal” “prediction of proof” in our research approaches have translated poorly to the domain of education with a “imperative resulting denigration of the domain as and and a distrust of the knowledge acquired “soft” “unscientific” to date. Similarly, our adoption of the physical sciences of generalizable simplicity” has “imperative created difficulties for our ability to represent well the complexity of the social interactions that shape education and learning at a local level. Using analogies to the scientific paradigms associated with physics, this talk will reconsider the place of the outcomes-based, predictive, generalizability-driven goals of research in the production and evolution of knowledge, and will explore the implications for “scientific” enhancing the value of research in health professional education.
accomplishing the tasks they perceive as necessary to succeed in the system. If we are trying to make teaching and assessment more relevant to our goals for the students, therefore, perhaps the question we should be challenging ourselves with is not what educational strategies would ideally maximize the acquisition of these goals, but rather how do we create willing partners in our students, and what do our grand educational strategies reduce to if they don’t play along? “It’s not rocket science: Rethinking research in health professions education” (Feb 1, 9:00 am, 500 University Ave., Room 303) The health professional education community has been struggling with a number of issues regarding the place and value of research in the field, including: the role of theory building vs applied research; the relative value of generalizable vs. contextually rich localized solutions; and the relative value of local vs. multi-institutional research. In part, these debates have been limited by the fact that the health professional education community has been deeply entrenched in the physical sciences as a model for “ideal” research. The resulting emphasis on the goal of “prediction and control” and the attendant “imperative of proof” in our research approaches have translated poorly to the domain of education with a resulting denigration of the domain as “soft” and “unscientific” and a distrust of the knowledge acquired to date. Similarly, our adoption of the physical sciences “imperative of generalizable simplicity” has created difficulties for our ability to represent well the complexity of the social interactions that shape education and learning at a local level. Using analogies to the scientific paradigms associated with physics, this talk will reconsider the place of the outcomes-based, predictive, generalizability-driven goals of research in the production and evolution of “scientific” knowledge, and will explore the implications for enhancing the value of research in health professional education.