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#IAMSE17 – Call for Poster Abstracts – Due 12/15!

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The International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE) is pleased to announce the call for abstracts for Oral and Poster presentations for the 21st Annual IAMSE Conference to be held in Burlington, Vermont from June 10-13, 2017. The IAMSE meeting offers opportunities for faculty development and networking, bringing together medical sciences and medical education across the continuum of health care education.

Please click here to submit your abstract today.

Please note: The first time you enter the site, you will be required to create a user profile. All abstracts for Oral and Poster presentations must be submitted in the format requested through the online abstract submission site.

Submission deadline is December 15, 2016. Abstract acceptance notifications will be returned by March 1.

Students – Would you like someone to review your proposal before you submit it? If so, the IAMSE Student Research Committee members will review your proposal and give you feedback to improve your proposal. The deadline for this optional review is November 14, 2016 (one month before the actual submission deadline). Please send your proposal to colleen.croniger@case.edu.

IAMSE Fall 2016 WAS Session 4 Highlights

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In case you missed yesterday’s Webcast Audio Seminar (WAS) Session, here are the highlights of this session:

The Breadth and Depth of Standardized Patients in the Teaching and Assessment of Clinical Skills

Gayle Gliva-McConvey
Eastern Virginia Medical School

Heidi A. Lane EdD
Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine

Carrie Bohnert MPA
University of Louisville School of Medicine

  • The evolution of standardized patient education has been ongoing since the 1960’s and today is an ever-expanding educational methodology that is utilized across the continuum of medical education.
  • Standardized patients can provide valuable feedback to learners across a variety of observable skills and techniques (e.g. interpersonal communication, professionalism, scrubbing, etc.).
  • Standardized patient feedback works in tandem with clinician feedback; it does not replace clinician feedback.
  • Studies report strong inter-rater reliability between physician and standardized patient checklists.
  • Standardized patients’ roles across the medical education spectrum are increasing in breadth in non-traditional areas such as mock interviews, customer satisfaction, business administration, etc.
  • Running a standardized patient program is a complex operation that involves adequate financial resources along with ongoing training and planning.
  • Focused training for all standardized patients is essential to optimize the learning encounter.

For more information on the final session or to register, please click here.

IAMSE Fall 2016 WAS Session 3 Highlights

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In case you missed yesterday’s Webcast Audio Seminar (WAS) Session, here are the highlights of this session:

Entrustment deciscion making in EPA-based curricula
Olle ten Cate, Ph.D.
University Medical Center Utrecht

  1. Competency-based ME
    • Widely accepted
    • Based on competence, and not the amount of time spent in training
    • Analytic framework approach where the feature of the doctor is divided into seven areas, Medical Expert, Collaborator, Communicator, Manager, Health Advocate, Scholar and Professional.
    • Several issues with this approach that lead to creating competencies in practice
  2. Entrustable Professional Activities
    • Defined as “units of professional practice (tasks) that may be entrusted to a learner to execute unsupervised, once he or she has demonstrated the required competence.
    • EPAs and competency are not the same
    • EPAs are units of work that must be done whereas competencies are a trait of an individual.
    • EPAs are work descriptors and competencies are person descriptors
  3. Current Issues in the Work Place
    • Assessment scores tend to be too high, not willing to assign failing grades
    • Assessment based on one feature rather than all areas
    • Assessments are not reproducible, standardized, subjective
    • Exposes a need for a reliable test
    • Observations cannot always be turned in to a score.
  4. Entrustment as an Assessment
    • Included several articles on this subject
    • Recognize ability + right + duty to act
    • Typical learner assessment tends to focus on evaluation of ability
    • Entrustment of learners tend to combine the evaluation of ability with the permission to act
    • and the readiness to be scheduled for service.
    • Values of those we trust: ability, integrity, reliability and humility
    • Two modes of Entrustment decisions
      • Ad-hoc: happens daily, based on presumptive and initial trust
      • Summative: based on grounded trust

For more information on the next sessions or to register, please click here.

IAMSE Web Audio Seminar Series “New Tools and Paradigms for Assessing Professionalism in the Health Sciences”

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New Tools and Paradigms for Assessing Professionalism in the Health Sciences
Presenter: John Mahan
October 6, 12 PM ET

Professionalism is a critical component of both undergraduate and graduate medical education. Continual assessment of professionalism is necessary for mastery of this competency and to help learners understand and ultimately develop skills to avoid professionalism lapses. Individual behavior and attitudes are often affected by the overall work and learning environments and role modeling by attending physicians and peer pressure from colleagues can contribute to both positive and unprofessional behaviors.  This engaging webinar will provide grounding in the current state of professionalism assessment, insights on the obstacles and strategies  for assessing professionalism.

For more information and to register for the Fall 2016 Audio Seminar Series, please click here.

IAMSE Fall 2016 WAS Session 2 Highlights

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In case you missed yesterday’s Webcast Audio Seminar (WAS) Session, here are the highlights of this session:

Self-directed learning in your curriculum—getting from theory to practice.
Sandrijn Vanschaik, MD, PhD
University of California San Francisco (UCSF)

Douglas Larsen, M.D.
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

William Cutrer, M.D.
Vanderbilt University

  • Physicians and health care professionals need life-long learning skills because of rapidly expanding medical knowledge
  • Self-regulated learning that links (goals/plans) to (actions/monitoring) to (assessment/reflection) in a circular fashion is the most optimal learning framework for taking the novice practitioner to expert
  • Student goal setting needs to be in an appropriate timeframe and a collaborative discussion between student and faculty
  • The Master Adaptive Learner develops life-long learning skills that can applied to learning now, the immediate future, and much later
  • Critical thinking and reflection are necessary at each of the steps in the process of self-regulated learning
  • Coaching from mentors/teachers/peers accentuates the success of self-regulated learning

For more information on the next sessions or to register, please click here.

IAMSE Web Audio Seminar Series “The Breadth and Depth of Standardized Patients in the Teaching and Assessment of Clinical Skills”

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BohnertLaneGliva-McConvey

The Breadth and Depth of Standardized Patients in the Teaching and Assessment of Clinical Skills
Presenters: Carrie Bohnert, Heidi Lane, and Gayle Gliva-McConvey
September 29, 12 PM ET

Over the past five decades Standardized Patient methodology has evolved from its roots in teaching and assessing proficiency in communicating with patients., Standardized Patients (SPS) now perform a variety of roles in medical and non-medical education from undergraduate learning to licensure examinations to continuing education.  In this presentation, we will use a non-traditional definition of Standardized Patients (SPs):  “individuals who are trained to perform in a role in a standardized and repeatable way where presentation varies based only on learner performance.  SPs are used for teaching and assessment of learners in a broad range of skills in simulated environments.  SPs are trained to facilitate learning, provide feedback and evaluate learner performance.”

Three institutions (Eastern Virginia Medical School, Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and the University of Louisville) are represented in this presentation. Discussions will encompass the traditional and evidence-based ways SPs are integrated into medical curriculums for teaching and assessing clinical skills, and widening the lens to include teaching and assessment of skills that are historically taught by clinicians, as a solution for clinical teaching when clinician time is challenging. We will also present innovative uses of the SP methodology to challenge our audience’s imagination.

For more information and to register for the Fall 2016 Audio Seminar Series, please click here.

#IAMSE17 – Plenary Highlight: Eric Mazur

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The 21st Annual IAMSE Meeting is just around the corner, and we would like you to get to know some of our keynote speakers! We have four plenary speakers this year, and we hope you enjoy their presentations.

Eric Mazur: Confessions of a Converted Lecturer [Harvard University]

I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students’ performance significantly

For more information on Dr. Mazur, please click here.

Be sure to Save the Date for the 2017 IAMSE Meeting! The Meeting will be held in Burlington, Vermont on June 10-13, 2017.

We hope to see you there!

IAMSE Exhibiting at PNEG Meeting

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The 2016 Professional Nurse Educators Group (PNEG) Annual Conference will be taking place in Columbus, Ohio from October 21-23. The IAMSE booth will be present at the conference to exhibit, so if you plan on attending this meeting, do not forget to swing by and say hello!

Click here for more information on the PNEG conference.

IAMSE Fall 2016 WAS Session 1 Highlights

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In case you missed yesterday’s Webcast Audio Seminar (WAS) Session with Laurel Gorman, here are the highlights of her talk:

Use of preclinical High Fidelity Medical Simulations (HFMS) to promote the integration of basic and clinical sciences
Laurel Gorman, PhD
University of Central Florida

  • High fidelity medical simulators (HFMS) are sophisticated, life-like computerized manikins that can be used with clinical case scenarios to help students learn and integrate basic science concepts
  • Using HFMS can address accreditation standards focused on active learning
  • Evidence exists (references provided) that using HFMS improves short and long-term learning
  • HFMS can be used in the pre-clinical years as long as the cases are tailored (scaffolds) to the appropriate learning level of the student
  • Case scenarios used with HFMS must be constructed by a team of clinicians and basic scientists
  • Debriefing exercises should also be conducted by these teams and tailored to the learning appropriate level of the student and scheduled for at least the same length of time as the learning exercise. The debriefing exercise is an essential part of the learning experience.

For more information on the next sessions or to register, please click here.

Paula Smith – Board of Directors

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I greatly value being an active member of IAMSE, and have enjoyed many an inspiring discussion with colleagues from across the globe at conferences and committee meetings. The IAMSE community permits genuine networking opportunities, and a real sense of kindred spirits amongst its membership. The annual conference provides opportunities to learn directly from others about current best practice in education and, together with the webinar series and IAMSE publications, gives plenty of new ideas to introduce into my own institution.

IAMSE Web Audio Seminar Series “Entrustment decision making in EPA-based curricula”

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Entrustment decision making in EPA-based curricula
Presenter: Olle ten Cate
September 22, 12 PM ET

Assessment of clinical competence is an ongoing topic of debate among medical educators. Competency-based medical education intends to train and assess residents and students who meet predefined standards. The quest for psychometrically valid assessments, i.e. sound measurement of trainee competencies, to provide sufficient certainty to the public that all those who complete undergraduate medical education are ready for residency, and all those who complete graduate medical education are ready for unsupervised practice, has not yet yielded a gold standard for evaluation.

A new concept in workplace training and assessment is Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs), units of professional practice that learners may execute without supervision once they have satisfactorily demonstrated to possess the relevant competence in postgraduate specialty training, or indirect supervision in undergraduate medical education.

EPA-based curricula with entrustment decisions provide a conceptual change in perspective on both the standards for competence and their evaluation among trainees.

This presentation will focus on entrustable professional activities for curriculum development and assessment, the concept of entrustment as part of assessment and entrustability scales that use levels of supervision as anchor points. The connection with milestones will be highlighted. While EPA-based assessment is new and there is yet limited experience with EPA-based curricula, there are a number of arguments to guide a development in that direction.

For more information and to register for the Fall 2016 Audio Seminar Series, please click here.

IAMSE Web Audio Seminar Series “Self-directed learning in your curriculum – getting from theory to practice”

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vanSchaik Larsen William Cutrer

Self-directed learning in your curriculum—getting from theory to practice
Presenter: Sandrijin van Schaik, Douglas Larsen, and William Cutrer
September 15, 12 PM ET

In today’s health care arena with rapidly expanding knowledge, yesterday’s best practice may be obsolete tomorrow. This creates an imperative for physicians to be life-long learners. As students progress through medical education their learning will need to be increasingly self-directed and develop the necessary skills to diagnose and address their own learning gaps. Despite the growing recognition that such skills can and should be taught, this is not yet a consistently integrated component of medical school curriculum.  In this webinar, we will first define terminology and explain theoretical frameworks that guide our understanding of self-directed, life-long learning; including metacognition, self-regulation, informed self-assessment and the newer framework of master adaptive learning. We will then provide a brief literature review of strategies employed to help students develop the relevant skills, including the use of reflection, learning plans, portfolios and coaches. We will discuss challenges encountered when applying theoretical frameworks to practical strategies and areas of ambiguity in which more research is needed. We will end with some practical suggestions based on the literature and our own experiences.

For more information and to register for the Fall 2016 Audio Seminar Series, please click here.