Scholarship in Medical Education: Examining our Purpose and Progress

Abstract

O n behalf of the JGIM editorial team, we are pleased to present the 2015 Medical Education Theme Issue. The process of preparing this issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine focusing on medical education has been rigorous and rewarding. Authors represent the full spectrum of medical education, from students to senior faculty. This theme issue includes original research, perspectives, a systematic review, and a medical humanities piece. Articles are clustered along five themes: Collaboration within Health Systems, Careers in Primary Care, Critical Thinking, Assessing Competency, and the Learning Environment. Each theme is discussed in an accompanying editorial.To gain perspective on how medical education is maturing and progressing, we further classified each research study reported in this issue of JGIM according to its purpose. The framework that we used to classify each study was based on whether its primary purpose was description, justification, or clarification. 1 Descriptive studies are observational, and answer the question, BWhat was done?Ĵ ustification studies compare methods and seek to identify whether one method is better than another. They seek to answer the question, BDid it work?^Clarification studies identify why or how an intervention worked the way that it did and seek to answer, BWhy did it work?^The classification of the purpose of research can prompt authors to broaden the range of questions asked about a particular topic being studied. Considering the purpose of research assists in designing not just one, but rather a series of studies that builds knowledge and contributes to the field being investigated. This scheme is useful for designing a line of inquiry which, over time, will advance our knowledge of medical education. Observational studies can lead to formulation of a model or conceptual framework that can be used to subsequently predict attitudes or behaviors investigated through justification and or clarification studies.The framework can provide a template for designing a program of research within a given area. The majority of the studies reported in this issue are descriptive or observational in nature. These studies describe attitudes, perceptions, or relationships with implications for educational practice. For decades, we have conducted studies examining the relationship of clerkship length and clerkship setting (whether inpatient or outpatient) on measures of student achievement. There was a fair amount of research on the effects that this has had on student mastery of the core concepts of internal medicine. In addition, the influence of the sequence in which internal medicine was completed in relation to other clerkships was also questioned, as well as the presence or absence of formal didactic sessions during the internal medicine clerkship. In a well-designed observational study in this issue, Cuddy et al. report that clerkship length and the order in which the internal medicine clerkship is taken have an effect on achievement of internal medicine concepts as me...