Issues, Trends and Challenges for Research in Medical Education.

Abstract

Research in medical education needs studies exploring how the design and conduct of programmes affect the clinical outcomes produced by doctors. We need to ask the question What do we know about the link between what doctors are taught and how they perform?. To make medical education research studies worthwhile, there needs to be thorough definitions of the predictor and criterion variables and an adequate sample size to conduct statistical analysis. Research in education is different from research in medicine; as the designed curriculum contains many components,the time between learning and developing clear outcomes are measured in a matter of years, and much of the analysis is qualitative as quantitative outcomes like examination results contain many confounders including personal attributesof the subjects.Keywords: curriculum, medical education, research