How to Publish Your Results
Presenter: Peter de Jong
February 4, 12 PM ET

In publishing scholarly work, there are several opportunities available to present your results to a specific audience. One way of sharing your results is presenting at conferences on medical education. These conferences can be found at a national as well as an international level. The most common types of conference contributions are the oral and poster presentations. Presenting at a conference can be a good and maybe even the most appropriate way to publish your work. Another option is publication in a (scientific) medical education journal. For publishing in a journal, not only the writing skills of the author are important. At least as important is choosing the right strategy in submitting the work to the most appropriate journal. It is also useful to know how the Editorial Office and Editorial Board of a journal handle the manuscripts received. Knowledge of these last two aspects can significantly increase the chances for acceptance of the manuscript. The session will give the attendees more insight in the editorial processes of a journal and several concrete strategies to increase the chances of acceptance of their work. The presenter will showcase the internal procedures of IAMSE’s journal Medical Science Educator to explain the attendees what is happening behind the scenes of a journal. Some general advice will be given in order to make the process of submission as successful as possible. At the end of the session the participants will have a better understanding of ways to publish their results.

For more information or to register for the Winter Audio Seminar, please click here.

How to do Educational Research
Presenter: David Yens
January 21, 12 PM ET

What is educational research in medical and health professions education? What types of research are conducted? What methods are used? These will be illustrated with examples from the literature. Following a brief review of these topics, an example of the educational research process will be provided that examines the choices at each stage of the process.

For more information or to register for the Winter Audio Seminar, please click here.

How to Get Started
Presenter: Grace Brannan
January 14, 12 PM ET

This session will introduce the audience to the basics of medical education research and scholarly work. We will discuss topics that can be studied or reported, best practices and challenges, and things to consider before engaging in medical education research. We will illustrate the steps through a few case studies.

For more information or to register for the Winter Audio Seminar, please click here.

Overview of the Status and Future Direction
Presenter: Geoff Norman
January 7, 12 PM ET

Medical education research is a relatively new field, which can trace its origins precisely to a group in Buffalo, NY, led by George Miller in the 1950s. These individuals came from diverse backgrounds, with virtually no relevant prior academic achievement. However through the collaborations engendered by the collaboration between medical teachers and academics, the field rapidly evolved. A major stimulus for the field was the development of the new problem-based schools at McMaster and Maastricht in the 1970s, with both schools committing resources to fund major research programs to evaluate the success of these innovations. Finally, another parallel development was the efforts by the American licensing and certifying bodies, primarily the National Board of Medical Examiners and the American Board of Internal Medicine, as well as the Medical Council of Canada, to improve student evaluation methods.

All of these developments set the stage for the field as we see it today, where a large number of researchers from many different social and behavioral sciences, from policy analysis to kinesiology, use a potpourri of research methods to address diverse questions related to health professions education. While this diversity is an enormous strength and a defining characteristic of the field, it does bring into focus some fundamental questions about what are the common threads. In particular, as the field matures standards for research have evolved. No longer is the focus solely or even primarily on the design of solutions for local problems; instead many journals demand evidence that research has theoretical underpinnings and generalizable application.

In this session, I will attempt to engage you in exploring some of these questions. We will explore, in a general way, what, if any, are the commonalities of all our research enterprises, and indeed what is the demarcation between scientific inquiry and other academic pursuits. In the course of the talk, we should be able to better understand what are the ingredients of successful research in health sciences education.