DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

For my Medical Education Research Certificate (MERC) program's research project, I chose a qualitative study of the challenges that faculty would face if they wanted to create a Mastery Rubric de novo, and without specific input from me or any other educational expert. The Mastery Rubric that I wanted to help the Pathology program create was one to guide their plans to revise the curriculum supporting a one-month rotation on "research" for residents. The result was "no", but while coming to this understanding of the complexity of creating a Mastery Rubric, I both a) identified the critical elements that any Mastery Rubric creation enterprise must have; and b) realized that "research" in pathology as a topic conflates two distinct types of research, one where the use of pathological tools and techniques supports research from another discipline's perspective, and one where pathology tools and techniques are themselves the topic of the research. This dichotomy does not appear in the published literature (as of April 2013); but it has profound implications for how "research in pathology" should be taught. To strengthen pathology residents' understanding of research generally, and to also support their appreciation specifically for pathology, only that research where pathology itself is the main aim should be targeted. This both serves to introduce research as a construct and explore elements of research generally and underscores the importance of research in and for pathology as a discipline. The MERC project was presented at the 2011 Research Conference of the North Eastern Group on Educational Affairs of the AAMC  MR-PR.negea11mar11.poster.pdf. I have been working on a manuscript describing this re-imagination of instruction in research for pathology, and the manuscript project was submitted as an oral presentation for the International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE) for the 2013 meeting in Scotland. It was accepted as a poster presentation (as well as a poster describing the reconceptualization of instruction in the responsible conduct of research, and an oral presentation on choosing criterion, over normative, referenced decisions in medical schools; co-authored with Dr. Peg Weissinger, Associate Dean for Assessment and Educational Scholarship in the Georgetown School of Medicine). I was unable to attend the IAMSE meeting due to funding conflicts with another international education meeting, the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) 15th Biennial Conference in Munich, August 2013, for which I will be serving as a discussant on the symposium on rubrics and higher education.

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.