Med Ed

Part 1: A view from engineering — Surgery’s a vividly visible part of medicine — every medical television show has an arrogant surgeon somewhere in the mix. It makes for compelling television, and it definitely makes an impression, but what’s surgery really like? Here are a few things I came away with from my third/fourth year surgery…

Mark hedging questions are essentially MCQ question (Single best answer questions). The main difference is that when the question is rendered to the students, in the MCQ case, students are to select one single answer. …

Though not an explicit part of the Team-Based Learning process, for activities to be performed in teams (tRAT and AEs), a team leader or team representative is to be selected to answer the questions on behalf of the team. In LAMS, we dedicate a full activity to leader selection where…

When using the Team-Based Learning strategy, it is important to assess whether the students are ready for solving real-world problems in the Application Exercises. To ascertain the students’ preparedness, you need to be able to discern and interpret the readiness assurance process (RAP) results. To dissect the RAP results effectively…

As the year ends, my mind is a tangle of emotions on how to describe 2020. The pandemic continues to ravage the world, but this summer, we also witnessed a tremendous uprising against racism. People all over the world spoke out, companies boldly declared “Black Lives Matter”, health care professionals…

Confessions of a medical professional with long tail COVID. Today marks a century of days after the onset of COVID-19 symptoms for me. I’m not one to post extensively on social media, but as I continue to recover, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect over the last few…

Presentations in medical education fail to inspire, engage, and inform. Not for lack of effort or experience, but because we as educators focus too much on the what of the data rather than the so what of the story.¹ We approach presentations as if the purpose is to deliver as…

Learning styles do not exist. Er, well — they sort of — not really, might… It’s complicated. Learning style theory Learning style theory is built on the idea that we all have a primary learning style — visual, auditory, kinesthetic, verbal, etc (there are A LOT more, by the way). …