Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to ease the human resources crisis in healthcare by facilitating diagnostics, decision-making, big data analytics and administration, among others. For ...this we must first tackle the technological, ethical and legal obstacles.The human resource crisis is widening worldwide, and it is obvious that it is not possible to provide care without workforce. How can disruptive technologies in healthcare help solve the variety of human resource problems? Will technology empower physicians or replace them? How can the medical curriculum, including post-graduate education prepare professionals for the meaningful use of technology? These questions have been growing for decades, and the promise of disruptive technologies filling them is imminent with digital health becoming widespread. Authors of this essay argue that AI might not only fill the human resources gap, but also raises ethical questions we need to deal with today.While there are even more questions to address, our stand is that AI is not meant to replace caregivers, but those who use AI will probably replace those who don't. And it is possible to prepare for that.
A recent spate of state laws attempts to limit how much schools teach about critical race theory. Robert Kim surveys the current legislation, noting that they fail to grapple with actual problems in ...the teaching of history and often contain loopholes that reduce their impact. He also notes that, although states have power over school curricula, the courts have struck down laws related to school curricula when those laws appear to have a discriminatory purpose.
Strong scientific writing skills are the foundation of a successful research career and require training and practice. Although these skills are critical for completing a PhD, most students receive ...little formal writing instruction prior to joining a graduate program. In 2015, the University of Iowa Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) addressed this issue by developing the scientific writing course Grant Writing Basics (GWB). Here we describe the structure of this course and its effectiveness. GWB is an interactive, workshop-based course that uses a National Institutes of Health (NIH) F30 predoctoral fellowship proposal as a platform for building writing expertise. GWB incorporates established pedagogical principles of adult learning, including flipped classrooms, peer teaching, and reiterative evaluation. Time spent in class centers on active student analysis of previously submitted fellowship applications, discussion of writing resources, active writing, facilitated small group discussion of critiques of student writing samples, revision, and a discussion with a panel of experienced study section members and a student who completed a fellowship submission. Outcomes of GWB include a substantial increase in the number of applications submitted and fellowships awarded. Rigorous evaluation provides evidence that learning objectives were met and that students gained confidence in both their scientific writing skills and their ability to give constructive feedback. Our findings show that investment in formal training in written scientific communication provides a foundation for good writing habits, and the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in this vital aspect of a scientific research career. Furthermore, they highlight that evaluation is valuable in guiding course evolution. Strategies embedded in GWB can be adapted for use in any graduate program to advance scientific writing skills among its trainees.
Introduction Since the beginning of the 21st century, competency-based education has been proposed as an approach to education in many disciplines including the medical sciences and it has become a ...dominant approach in many countries. We aimed to explore the lived experiences of general medical students about developing competencies in the academic curriculum. Methods We conducted a phenomenology method to study lived experiences of general medical students through selecting participants via a purposeful sampling strategy. Snowballing and maximum variation samplings were also applied to recruit additional participants. The study was conducted at a Medical School in Iran. Three successive phases of qualitative data analysis, namely, data reduction by coding, data structuring by categorization, and data interpretation by discussion were applied to analyze the interviews. Results The results of the research showed that students’ lived experiences fall under 4 main themes with 9 subthemes. The main themes show that (1) the compartmentalized curriculum in basic courses is experienced as the missing parts in a puzzle, (2) the physiopathology curriculum is experienced as swimming on land, (3) the externship is experienced as touring a mysterious land, (4) the internship is experienced as unleashed arrows. Discussion Our findings reveal that despite the changes already made in the curriculum, its compartmentalization is still a main obstacle to achieving competency-based medical education. A strict requirement for leaving the discipline-based curriculum behind is to use an integrated approach, in which basic science courses are connected with clinical cases, and physiopathology courses are connected with externships and internships.
This study focuses on the different ways in which teachers relate their situational agency and professional assignment to the national curriculum content and curriculum dilemmas. It builds ...theoretically on transactional realism and empirically on analyses of interviews with teachers, exploring the nature of teacher agency during the enactment of a new Swedish curriculum reform. To uphold a dual perspective of teachers' relation to the curriculum as both collectively and individually experienced and as both an ideal and realistic-practical relation, we term the future as 'projective experiences', the presence as 'practical-evaluative experiences' and the past 'iterational experiences' in relation to agency. Especially, we are interested in the 'what' in the curriculum - what the teachers find intriguing, important or impossible and what affects how they relate to the curriculum as part of the multidimensional structures influencing their agency. This approach reveals that the crucial issue of teacher agency is related to the policy discourse on knowledge and equity as standards and the uniformity of assessment and its pedagogical consequences.
Racism is a pervasive system that permeates all social activity within U.S. society and for over four hundred years has constantly reproduced systems of inequality and disparate outcomes for Black ...people. Increasingly, attention has been given to integrating anti-racist content and methods into social work education and practice. By integrating concepts from racial equity and liberatory education theories, and providing a case example of one university's process of critically assessing students' experiences of how anti-racist pedagogies manifest within social work's implicit and explicit curriculum, this paper offers insights into potential strategies to prepare social work students to adequately address the needs of Black clients upon graduation.
Experts in the field have advocated for critical approaches to Spanish heritage language (HL) curricula in which learners' proficiency in the language varieties that they bring from their homes and ...communities is considered an asset and culturally valuable knowledge. The proposal described here focuses on the adoption of a programmatic perspective, one that promotes, over a longer period of time, the implementation of pedagogical practices that foster academic success and linguistic empowerment among heritage speakers in the classroom. This article presents a critically oriented six-course Spanish HL program that challenges the subordination of HL students' linguistic practices and examines the practical implementation of CLA (Critical Language Awareness) pedagogies. Further, this article details results from a study on HL learners' language attitudes as a first attempt to assess their sociolinguistic awareness. We hope that a detailed consideration of the design, implementation, and preliminary evaluation of this innovative program can provide a model for other educators who seek to put critical pedagogies into practice.
Computational Thinking is considered a universal competence, which should be added to every child’s analytical ability as a vital ingredient of their school learning. In this article we further ...elaborate on what Computational Thinking is and present examples of what needs to be taught and how. First we position Computational Thinking in Papert’s work with LOGO. We then discuss challenges in defining Computational Thinking and discuss the core and peripheral aspects of a definition. After that we offer examples of how Computational Thinking can be addressed in both formal and informal educational settings. In the conclusion and discussion section an agenda for research and practice is presented.
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