Bad Education

Bad faith, medical education, and post-truth

The choice to not study ‘actual use’ of feedback in clinical practice seems to me to be a flaw in research design, an inevitable consequence of which is that the study report is peppered with use of the conditional tense—‘would’ and ‘could’. In situating the study’s results in the world of the possible and not the actual, the authors mirror the common medical education practice of learning thro...

Competition in higher education – good or bad?

Competition is an integrated part of most civilizations, from sports to education. Often competition arise whether or not it was intended and higher education is no exception from this. Should teachers acknowledge this and try to introduce competition as a part of the course or should they try to prevent competition, even spontaneously arisen competition? In this paper an overview of effects of...

Editorial - how bad is medical education research anyway?

When does education matter? The protective effect of education for cohorts graduating in bad times.

Using Eurobarometer data, we document large variation across European countries in education gradients in income, self-reported health, life satisfaction, obesity, smoking and drinking. While this variation has been documented previously, the reasons why the effect of education on income, health and health behaviors varies is not well understood. We build on previous literature documenting that...

Good, bad and ugly: Exploring the Machiavellian power dynamics of leadership in medical education

Introduction: Medical education requires participation of variousstakeholders and this contributes to power dynamics operating atmultiple levels. Personality traits of an individual can affect thesmooth execution of the educational programmes and eventuallythe professionalism of the environment. With the increased focuson leadership traits in medical education and collaboration inhealth care se...