MHPE 494 Elective
Cognition, Expertise, and Instructional Design
Credit hours: 2
This course addresses the implications of human cognition for instructional design in health profession education. It will involve a critical examination of research on expertise, expertise development, and instructional design.
Instructor: Jeffrey Cheung
MHPE 494 Elective
Simulations in HPE
Credit hours: 2
The purpose of this elective is to introduce the learners to the use of simulation technology in medical education. The scope is focused, not comprehensive, and addresses instruction and assessment at the level of individuals and teams. Participants are expected to design and present a clinical educational or assessment project that uses simulation technology.
Instructor: Ara Tekian
MHPE 494 Elective
Grant Writing
Credit hours: 2
This skills course provides hands-on experience writing a health professions education research or evaluation grant using the US NIH format as a model. The focus is spent on how to develop the components of a grant to appeal to funders, rather than on research design itself.
Instructors: Alan Schwartz
MHPE 494 Elective
Introduction to Quantitative Data Analysis
Credit hours: 2
Introduction of students to a variety of techniques for analyzing behavioral science or educational data and provides hands-on experience performing these analyses with statistical software. Students will gain a sense of the breadth of techniques available for understanding and exploring relationships in data. The ulterior motive of the instructor is to free students from the tyranny of fear of quantitative analysis.
Instructor: Alan Schwartz
MHPE 494 Elective
Innovative Assessment Methods
Credit hours: 2
This course explores assessment approaches not addressed in depth in MHPE 502, including standardized oral exams, the Key Features approach, situational judgment tests, programmatic assessment, assessment in mastery learning settings, and how assessment affects learning. The focus is on validity and threats to validity for each approach.
Instructors: Rachel Yudkowsky and Dorthea Juul
MHPE 494 Elective
Faculty Development
Credit hours: 2
Knowledge and skills in faculty development are a major component of the repertoire of leaders in health professions education. Faculty development may be defined as a broad range of activities designed to prepare, assist and renew faculty, in various positions and career stages, for their academic roles and responsibilities of teaching, research, administration, writing and/or career development. This course focuses on a spectrum of faculty development programs and activities, including workshops, fellowships and longitudinal programs, coaching, and mentoring. Particular attention will be paid to developing communities of practice. We will explore the workplace settings in which faculty apply the knowledge and skills learned during faculty development activities. Course activities include group reading and analysis of papers describing ‘best practices’ in faculty development, individual exercises to assess faculty development needs and the organizational context, and using the lessons learned to develop a faculty development plan for situations in students’ professional settings.
Instructor: Janet Riddle
MHPE 494 Elective
Assessment of ACGME Competencies & Milestones
Credit hours: 2
This course will review a select number of assessment methods for each of the ACGME competencies and the CanMED roles, elaborate on the selection process of assessment methods according to the milestones, select competency milestones from a pool of items and map to specialty milestones. Participants will critically review the assessment methods used at their home institutions and prepare a blueprint reflecting innovations that they want to introduce. This course is very interactive and includes a number of individual and group presentations.
Instructor: Ara Tekian
MHPE 494 Elective
Leadership & Professional Identity
Credit hours: 2
This course provides an introduction to social science theories that focus on professional identity formation in leadership contexts. We explore: how leaders in the health professions learn the social norms associated with leadership; how these norms are affected by various identities, such as gender, race, nationality, disability, and clinical specialty; and the impact of these types of identities on inter-professional groups.
Instructor: Laura Hirshfield
MHPE 494 Elective
Admissions, Student Progress & Oversight
Credit hours: 2
This course focuses on policies and practice related to oversight for student assessment and progress in health science curricula.
Instructor: Timothy Murphy
MHPE 494 Elective
Technology-Enhanced Instruction
Credit hours: 2
Provides students with conceptual frameworks and best practices for technology enhanced instruction.
Instructor: Gerald Stapleton
MHPE 494 Elective
Health Humanities
Credit hours: 2
This course focuses on the role of health humanities in instruction and assessment in health sciences curricula. Disciplinary perspectives are drawn from literature/narrative, history, and ethics.
Instructor: Sandy Sufian, Kristi Kirschner, and Michael Blackie
MHPE 494 Elective
Survey Research Methods
Credit hours: 2
This course will focus on the basics of quantitative survey design, administration, scoring, and statistical analysis for use in research and evaluation settings. Topics include: strengths and limitations of survey research methods; writing effective questionaire/survey/rating scale items; designing survey research instruments; sampling; survey administration; collecting and analyzing data; validity; reliability/reproducibility; and reporting the results. The course emphasizes quantitative methods and does not cover qualitative survey methods.
Instructor: Alan Schwartz
MHPE 494 Elective
Disability in Health Professional Education
Credit hours: 2
Despite the prevalence of disability in the population (~20%) and in health care settings, education about disability is not a routine component of health professions curricula. Nor are people with disabilities proportionately represented in the health professions. As a result, health professionals are unusually susceptible to cultural bias and stigma, and often poorly informed about the health issues facing people with disabilities. This elective will discuss how to teach health professions students about the following topics:
• Conceptual frameworks for addressing disabilities in the health professions
• Disability in health care settings including ADA, language, universal design
• The effects of ignorance, negative attitudes and bias on medical decision-making and health care outcomes
• The critical role of learning from and incorporating people with disabilities
• Disability inclusion in the health professions (including reasonable accommodations, technical standards, and movement toward competencies)
Instructor: Kristi Kirschner and Raymond Curry
MHPE 494 Elective
Instruction and Assessment with SPs
Credit hours: 2
This course provides a hands-on introduction to deploying standardized patients (SPs) to enhance instruction and assessment in HPE. Students will write an SP case, train an SP to portray the case, pilot the case, design an instruction program, and develop assessment instruments based on their case.
Instructor: Rachel Yudkowsky
MHPE 494 Elective
The Elements of Persuasive Writing
Credit hours: 2
As the title of the course suggests, there are various elements that go into composing persuasive writing – from a strong thesis statement and a well-reasoned argument to voice or tone and a “so what” – which is a reason for readers to keep reading, to be interested in what you’ve written.
Persuasiveness is important in all kinds of writing, from high-stakes projects like a thesis proposal, grant application, and an article to more common, everyday writing such as letters of recommendation and emails. We will look at all these different forms during the course and engage in various writing activities. Students are expected to come to class with a writing project, in any stage of development, that will be the focus of daily workshops and a final presentation.
Instructor: Michael Blackie
MHPE 532 Elective
Qualitative Methods
Credit hours: 2
This course is designed to introduce students to the logic and practice of qualitative research. After discussing various theories of research design, we will examine several methods of qualitative data collection used by researchers in health professions education, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each, and talk about how social scientists decide which methods are appropriate for particular research questions and in particular research contexts. These methods include in-depth qualitative interviews, focus groups, participant observation/ethnography, and qualitative content analysis. We will also focus on how to analyze qualitative data once it has been collected. Finally, students will have the opportunity to practice these methods through in-class activities and homework assignments, and the coursework will culminate in the development of a proposal for a rigorous qualitative research study.
Instructor: Laura Hirshfield
