Teaching Scientific Research Skills in an Elective Curriculum: Obstacles, Opportunities and Outcomes

This presentation will highlight our experiences teaching scientific research skills within the elective Scholarly Concentration in Biomedical Research at the USF Morsani College of Medicine. This Scholarly Concentration is part of our overarching Scholarly Concentration Program, an elective opportunity for our students to develop an independent scholarly product. The presentation will start with a brief program description and then focuses on the goals of the Biomedical Research Concentration regarding teaching scientific research skills. We will stress the specific challenges we have encountered developing this concentration and our experiences trying to address them, describing in some detail some of the more recently implemented measures. One of the major challenges to be discussed is achieving sustained student commitment to the concentration throughout all four years of medical school. In this regard we will discuss our new senior student mentorship program. We will further discuss how this elective inquiry-based curriculum influences the required core pre-clerkship curriculum The presentation will conclude with preliminary data attempting to measure the impact of this scientific-inquiry based curriculum on continued scholarship in the practice of medicine.