In small-group problem-based learning (PBL), students work cooperatively to solve complex, real-world problems. The problems lead the students to learn basic concepts rather than being presented as applications of concepts they have already learned. The goals are for students to learn and be able to apply the disciplinary content, develop critical thinking abilities, and acquire skills of life-...

BACKGROUND Mixed methods research, which is gaining popularity in medical education, provides a new and comprehensive approach for addressing teaching, learning, and evaluation issues in the field. AIM The aim of this article is to provide medical education researchers with 12 tips, based on consideration of current literature in the health professions and in educational research, for conduct...

CONTEXT Although training in basic science is generally considered a critical aspect of medical education, there is little consensus regarding its precise role in clinical reasoning. Whereas some reports suggest that biomedical knowledge is rarely used in routine diagnosis, other research has found that biomedical knowledge can become an integral part of the expert knowledge base. OBJECTIVE T...

Teach the Earth: The Science Education Resource Center (SERC) Portal for Geoscience Faculty (Carleton College). This portal is the gateway to thousands of pages of activities, workshops, course descriptions and more http://serc.carleton.edu/teachearth/index.html [1] See the SERC site Bringing Research on Learning to the Geosciences for a searchable database of articles on effective learning and...

Teach the Earth: The Science Education Resource Center (SERC) Portal for Geoscience Faculty (Carleton College). This portal is the gateway to thousands of pages of activities, workshops, course descriptions and more http://serc.carleton.edu/teachearth/index.html [1] See the SERC site Bringing Research on Learning to the Geosciences for a searchable database of articles on effective learning and...

Qualitative research is very important in educational research as it addresses the "how" and "why" research questions and enables deeper understanding of experiences, phenomena and context. Qualitative research allows you to ask questions that cannot be easily put into numbers to understand human experience. Getting at the everyday realities of some social phenomenon and studying important ques...

Health care struggles to transfer recent discoveries into high-quality medical care. Therefore, translational science seeks to improve the health of patients and communities by studying and promoting the translation of findings from bench research into clinical care. Similarly, medical education practice may be slow to adopt proven evidence of better learning and assessment. The Academic Emerge...

Recently, a method was proposed and tested to find saddle points of the action in simulations of non-abelian lattice gauge theory. The idea, called ‘extremization’, is to minimize ∫ (δS/δAμ) . The method was implemented in an explicitly gauge variant way, however, and gauge dependence showed up in the results. Here we show how extremization can be formulated in a way that preserves gauge invari...

Information and communication technology (ICT) has become, within a very short time, one of the basic building blocks of modern society. Many countries now understanding the importance of ICT and mastering the basic skills and concepts of it as part of the core of education. Organizations, experts and practitioners in the education sector increasingly recognizing the importance of ICT in suppor...

Researchers in medical education have been placing increased emphasis on "outcomes research," or the observable impact of educational interventions on patient care. However, although patient outcomes are obviously important, they should not be the sole focus of attention in medical education research. The purpose of this perspective is both to highlight the limitations of outcomes research in m...