Expanding our roles: embedded in curriculum design.

This article describes how librarians became involved as members of an interdisciplinary curricular team in a problem-based learning course for first- and second-year medical students. The experience illustrates how librarians can become part of a team, collaborating with medical faculty to assist in revising curricula, incorporating innovative teaching techniques, and creating effective simulated patient case scenarios. Working within an interdisciplinary collaborative team on curriculum development allows librarians to move beyond the traditional role of instruction and can lead to additional opportunities, including research and ongoing involvement in curricular changes.

A community feasibility study of a cooking behavior intervention in African-American adults at risk for cardiovascular disease: DC COOKS (DC Community Organizing for Optimal culinary Knowledge Study) with Heart.

BACKGROUND: Cooking interventions have increased in popularity in recent years. Evaluation by meta-analyses and systematic reviews show consistent changes in dietary quality reports and cooking confidence, but not of cardiovascular (CVD) biomarkers. Interventions evaluating or reporting behavioral mechanisms as an explanatory factor for these outcomes has been sparse. Moreover, evaluations of cooking interventions among communities with health disparities or food access limitations have received little attention in the literature. METHODS: This study will occur over two phases. Phase 1 will assess acceptability among the target population of African-American adults living within an urban food desert. Phase 2 will consist of a 6-week cooking intervention delivered at a community kitchen setting. Pre and post intervention visits for clinical examinations and biomarker collection will be conducted, as well as dietary and cooking skill assessments. Primary outcomes include cooking behavior and feasibility measures. Secondary outcomes are related to dietary quality, psychosocial factors, CVD biomarkers, and food environment measures. DISCUSSION: This study seeks to demonstrate feasibility of a community-based cooking intervention and to provide necessary information to plan future interventions that identify cooking behavior as an outcome of participation in cooking interventions among African-American adults, especially in relation to dietary and biomarker outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION: This study was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT04305431) on March 12, 2020.

Caffeinating the PBL return session: Curriculum innovations to engage students at two medical schools.

At the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, authors observed that problem-based learning (PBL) return sessions for first- and second-year medical students often lacked the energy and engagement of first sessions. Unlike in first sessions, where students took on the physician's role and actively problem solved, in return sessions students spent much of their time passively, listening to research reports on learning objectives. Time spent listening to reports dilutes return session impact, with the patient receding from view as the level of abstraction increases and learning issues take center stage. In this Perspective, the authors present innovations, developed separately at their respective medical schools between 2009 and 2012, designed to reenergize the return session.To frame the discussion of the return session slump and their innovations in response to it, the authors used self-determination theory (SDT) and active learning theory (ALT), both of which are supported by a considerable body of evidence. SDT provides understanding of how to maximize PBL learners' motivation, and ALT sheds light on how to promote PBL learners' incorporation of concepts into long-term memory. As motivation and memory are key factors in learning, both theories are appropriate tools to help understand and maximize the effectiveness of PBL. Finally, guided by these theories, the authors present reflections on future directions for the development of PBL.

Evaluating oral case presentations using a checklist: how do senior student-evaluators compare with faculty?

PURPOSE: Previous studies have shown student-evaluators to be reliable assessors of some clinical skills, but this model has not been studied for oral case presentations (OCPs). The purpose of this study was to examine the validity of student-evaluators in assessing OCP by comparing them with faculty. METHOD: In 2010, the authors developed a dichotomous checklist. They trained 30 fourth-year medical students (student-evaluators) to use it to assess 170 second-year medical students' OCPs in real time during a year-end objective structured clinical examination. Ten faculty physicians then scored videos of a random sample of these OCPs. After discarding items with poor faculty reliability, the authors assessed agreement between faculty and student-evaluators on 18 individual items, total scores, and pass/fail decisions. RESULTS: The total score correlation between student-evaluators and faculty was 0.84 (P < .001) and was somewhat better than the faculty-faculty intraclass correlation (r = 0.71). Using a 70% pass/fail cutoff, faculty and student-evaluator agreement was 74% (Kappa = 0.46; 95% CI, 0.20-0.72). Overall, student-evaluator scores were more lenient than faculty scores (72% versus 56% pass rates; P = .03). CONCLUSIONS: Senior student-evaluators were able to reliably assess second-year medical students' OCP skills. The results support the use of student-evaluators for peer assessment of OCPs in low-stakes settings, but evidence of leniency compared with faculty assessment suggests caution in using student-evaluators in high-stakes settings. Extending peer assessment to OCPs provides a practical approach for low-resource evaluation of this essential skill.