Twelve tips for using the Understanding by Design® curriculum planning framework.

BACKGROUND: Health professions faculty engaged in curriculum planning or redesign can struggle with developing courses or programs that align desired learner outcomes, such as competencies to be applied in a clinical setting, with assessment and instruction. AIMS: Our medical school implemented the Understanding by Design (UbD) framework to achieve alignment of outcomes, assessments and teaching during the renewal of our four-year curriculum. This article shares our strategies and practices for implementing UbD with teams of faculty curriculum developers. DESCRIPTION: The UbD framework is a 'backward' approach to curriculum development that begins by identifying learner outcomes, followed by the development of assessments that demonstrate achievement of competencies and concludes with the design of active learning experiences. UbD emphasizes the development of deep understandings that learners can transfer to novel contexts. CONCLUSIONS: We found UbD to be a flexible, adaptable approach that aligns program and course-level outcomes with learner-centred instruction and principles of competency-based medical education and assessment.

Evaluating the quality of learning-team processes in medical education: development and validation of a new measure.

BACKGROUND: Measurement of the quality of team processes in medical education, particularly in classroom-based teaching settings, has been limited by a lack of measurement instruments. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop and test an instrument to measure the quality of team interactions. METHOD: The authors created 30 items and reduced these to 18 items using factor analysis. They distributed the scale to 309 second-year medical students (RR = 95%) in a course that used teams and measured internal consistency, validity, and differences in scores between teams. RESULTS: Cronbach's alpha for the scale was 0.97. Team ratings were variable, with a mean score of 95.7 (SD 8.5) out of 108. Team Performance Scale (TPS) scores correlated inversely with the spread of peer evaluation scores (r = -0.38, P = .003). Differences between teams were statistically significant (P < .001, eta = 0.33). CONCLUSIONS: The TPS was short, had evidence of reliability and validity, and exhibited the capacity to distinguish between teams. This instrument can provide a measure of the quality of team interactions. More work is needed to provide further evidence of validity and generalizability.