Educators Teach Critical Lessons for Turning Academic Projects into Scholarly Successes

Educators often demand that their students or colleagues “show their work” as tangible evidence of learning. The Saturday, Nov. 16, ACR Convergence session From Idea to Impact: Transforming Educational Projects Into Scholarly Success turned this imperative around on educators and researchers to ensure their efforts translate into academic successes. 

Effective educators possess the ability to clearly define the objectives they aim to achieve through their work, accurately measure the impact of their efforts, and identify the optimal methods for disseminating or publishing their findings while planning an educational project.

One of the first steps successful instructors take is to clearly outline effective learning objectives and ensure all learning activities are designed to help achieve these objectives. This can be a tall task even for exceptional academics.

“A lot of very gifted educators are terrible at writing learning objectives,” said Rebecca Sadun, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Duke University.

Beneficial learning objectives should be actionable, measurable, observable, and specific. For example, a learning objective that states it wants learners to “understand” a concept or skill they’re being taught fails to delineate what “understanding” means in a tangible sense. An effective learning objective would stipulate that students must explain, evaluate, or apply their knowledge and skills in a demonstrable fashion.

Dr. Sadun explained that there are three domains of learning objectives: attitude, knowledge, and skills. Learning objectives that address attitude seek to communicate why a topic is important or why the learner should care about it. Knowledge-based learning objectives serve to effectively communicate the foundational information needed to develop a skill. Objectives designed around skills are more action-oriented and build upon the other two domains.

“The skills building is the crux of what we’re doing, and the knowledge and the attitudes are there to help serve that skills development,” Dr. Sadun explained.

Next, educators must be prepared to assess and evaluate the efficacy of their learning objectives.

Seetha Monrad, MD, Associate Dean for Medical Student Education, and Clinical Professor of Internal Medicine and Learning Health Sciences at the University of Michigan, asserted that there are key differences between the terms “assessment” and “evaluation.” Both are critical for educators to utilize.

Assessments can be defined as a systematic process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data to determine a student or learner’s knowledge, skills, and attitudes in relationship to learning objectives. This is why assessments and learning objectives must be aligned from the beginning. Evaluations are the systematic process of identifying, clarifying, and applying defensible criteria to determine an evaluation object’s merit in relationship to the principal criteria.

“The focus of assessments is the learners; the focus of evaluations is your educational program, your workshop, your lecture,” Dr. Monrad explained.

Dr. Monrad presented several evaluation framework models, including an experimental framework in which educators can cross-compare two or more differing approaches; a logic model that measures a linear relationship between a program’s components and its context, activities, outputs, and outcomes; and Kirkpatrick’s Model, commonly used in medical education, which appraises the effects of a learning program through a hierarchical order that captures learners’ reactions, learning, behaviors, and outcomes in the learning event.

Educators must also evaluate how they can impact learning by publishing their work for others to consume. According to David Leverenz, MD, MEd, Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University, it’s critical for educators to first take a step back and consider why they want to share their work in the first place.

“Beginning with the end in mind is the major goal here,” he said.

Dr. Leverenz also discussed the quandary of choosing between a medical education journal and a rheumatology journal as the place for those in the field of rheumatology to submit work. Submissions to medical education journals should contain findings that apply to medical professionals outside of the rheumatology community. However, most medical education journals will require the work to involve professionals outside the rheumatology field as well, according to Dr. Leverenz. He also explained that medical education journals often have a slightly more rigorous emphasis on the medical education methodology. Rather than aiming for the largest audience possible, it’s more important to consider where a published work will have the largest and most relevant impact.

“Academic promotion is important, but I think you would all agree that the main reason we want to share our work is that we want to have an impact, and we want to make sure we have that impact at the right time and the right venue,” Dr. Leverenz said.