We should nudge clinicians and trainees to participate in health professions education programmes.

Health Professional Education (HPE) programmes, such as mentorship, are widely regarded as being advantageous to the personal and professional development of clinicians and trainees. Involvement in a mentoring relationship is associated with positive outcomes for both mentees and mentors, including improved career preparation, increased career success, higher job satisfaction and reduced risk of burnout. Despite these data, a minority of trainees report having a mentor.

Twelve tips to optimize group decision-making in medical education: 'Tipping' the scales toward wisdom of the crowd and minimizing groupthink.

Group decision-making is now common in medical education, often used for decisions that are both complex and high stakes, such as determining whether to promote or remediate a trainee. In this context, it is often assumed that group decision making is superior to that of an individual, resulting in high quality decision outcomes through the pooling of collective knowledge and experience. Yet, while groups can outperform individuals, this is not guaranteed.

Six ways to get a grip on a mentorship program for residents and faculty.

Mentorship is recognized as beneficial to the personal and professional development of physicians. It has been shown to positively influence career success and research productivity for the mentee, while being associated with increased job satisfaction and lower risk of burnout for the mentor. At an institutional level, when aligned with strategic priorities, mentorship can facilitate gender and racial equality, and improve faculty retention.

Mentorship in medicine is a opportunity.

Mentorship is now recognized as essential to the personal and professional development of physicians. Over the past decade, it has become a common theme in medical education literature, and through this our understanding of mentorship has evolved. Despite this progress, we believe that the prevailing reductionist view of mentorship is oversimplified and may hinder further advances in this space.

Can we predict failure in licensure exams from medical students' undergraduate academic performance?

Background: In 2015, the Medical Council of Canada increased the minimum pass level for the Medical Council of Canada Qualifying Examination Part I, and students had a higher rate of failure than in previous years. The purpose of this study was to predict students at an increased odds of examination failure to allow for early, targeted interventions.

Methods: We divided our dataset into a derivation cohort and two validation cohorts and used multiple logistic regression to predict licensing examination failure.

Summative Assessment of Interprofessional "Collaborative Practice" Skills in Graduating Medical Students: A Validity Argument.

Purpose: To describe how the authors developed an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) station to assess aspects of collaborative practice competency and how they then assessed validity using Kane's framework.

Method: After piloting the collaborative practice OSCE station in 2015 and 2016, this was introduced at the Cumming School of Medicine in 2017. One hundred fifty-five students from the class of 2017 and 22 students from the class of 2018 participated.

Quantifying two-dimensional and three-dimensional stereoscopic learning in anatomy using electroencephalography.

Advances in computer visualization enabling both 2D and 3D representation have generated tools to aid perception of spatial relationships and provide a new forum for instructional design. A key knowledge gap is the lack of understanding of how the brain neurobiologically processes and learns from spatially presented content, and new quantitative variables are required to address this gap. The objective of this study was to apply quantitative neural measures derived from electroencephalography (EEG) to examine stereopsis in anatomy learning by comparing mean amplitude changes in N250 (related to object recognition) and reward positivity (related to responding to feedback) event related to potential components using a reinforcement-based learning paradigm.

How can we reduce bias during an academic assessment reappraisal?

To describe potential sources of bias during an academic assessment reappraisal and ways to mitigate these. We describe why the typical scenario of an academic assessment reappraisal - where committee members are asked to weigh contrasting accounts of past events that they did not witness, and to rate elusive constructs, such as "fairness" - is prone to multiple types of bias, including , and . We also discuss how increased awareness of sources of bias and of debiasing strategies can improve the validity of decision making.

Does the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) predict licensing examination performance in the Canadian context?

Background: Research on the predictive validity of the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) on licensing examination performance is varied in its conclusions, with only a few studies examining this relationship in a Canadian context. We assessed the predictive validity of the MCAT on successful performance on the Medical Council of Canada Qualifying Examination (MCCQE) Part 1 by students attending the Cumming School of Medicine.

Methods: Prospective data were collected on MCAT score and sub-section scores, MCCQE decision, multiple mini interview (MMI) performance, gender, and age.

Are we failing to "build on the scientific basis of medicine?".

In this article, we question if and why the Canadian national medical education organizations have failed to introduce or promote changes that compel or encourage Canadian medical schools to heed the recommendation from the Future of Medical Education in Canada report to "build on the scientific basis of medicine." We end by offering suggestions on how these organizations could help Canadian medical schools build in the scientific basis of medicine.

Choosing Our Own Pathway to Competency-Based Undergraduate Medical Education.

After many years in the making, an increasing number of postgraduate medical education (PGME) training programs in North America are now adopting a competency-based medical education (CBME) framework based on entrustable professional activities (EPAs) that, in turn, encompass a larger number of competencies and training milestones. Following the lead of PGME, CBME is now being incorporated into undergraduate medical education (UME) in an attempt to improve integration across the medical education continuum and to facilitate a smooth transition from clerkship to residency by ensuring that all graduates are ready for indirect supervision of required EPAs on day one of residency training. The Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada recently finalized its list of 12 EPAs, which closely parallels the list of 13 EPAs published earlier by the Association of American Medical Colleges, and defines the "core" EPAs that are an expectation of all medical school graduates.

How teachers can help learners build storage and retrieval strength.

Aim: To be an effective teacher, content expertise is necessary but alone does not guarantee optimal learning outcomes for students. In this article, the authors discuss ways in which medical teachers can shape the learning of their students and enable them to become more efficient and effective learners.

Methods: Using Bjork and Bjork's new theory of disuse as their framework, the authors discuss strategies to improve storage strength of to-be-learned information and strategies to improve retrieval strength of learned information.

The application of reward learning in the real world: Changes in the reward positivity amplitude reflect learning in a medical education context.

Evidence ranging from behavioural adaptations to neurocognitive theories has made significant advances into our understanding of feedback-based learning. For instance, over the past twenty years research using electroencephalography has demonstrated that the amplitude of a component of the human event-related brain potential - the reward positivity - appears to change with learning in a manner predicted by reinforcement learning theory (Holroyd and Coles, 2002; Sutton and Barto, 1998). However, while the reward positivity (also known as the feedback related negativity) is well studied, whether the component reflects an underlying learning process or whether it is simply sensitive to feedback evaluation is still unclear.

The grades that clinical teachers give students modifies the grades they receive.

Prior studies have shown a correlation between the grades students receive and how they rate their teacher in the classroom. In this study, the authors probe this association on clinical rotations and explore potential mechanisms. All In-Training Evaluation Reports (ITERs) for students on mandatory clerkship rotations from April 1, 2013 to January 31, 2015 were matched with the corresponding student's rating of their teacher (SRT).

Are Female Applicants Rated Higher Than Males on the Multiple Mini-Interview? Findings From the University of Calgary.

Purpose: The multiple mini-interview (MMI) improves reliability and validity of medical school interviews, and many schools have introduced this in an attempt to select individuals more skilled in communication, critical thinking, and ethical decision making. But every change in the admissions process may produce unintended consequences, such as changing intake demographics. In this article, two studies exploring gender differences in MMI ratings are reported.

Weighing the cost of educational inflation in undergraduate medical education.

Despite the fact that the length of medical school training has remained stable for many years, the expectations of graduating medical students (and the schools that train them) continue to increase. In this Reflection, the authors discuss motives for educational inflation and suggest that these are likely innocent, well-intentioned, and subconscious-and include both a propensity to increase expectations of ourselves and others over time, and a reluctance to reduce training content and expectations. They then discuss potential risks of educational inflation, including reduced emphasis on core knowledge and clinical skills, and adverse effects on the emotional, psychological, and financial wellbeing of students.

Cognitive load imposed by ultrasound-facilitated teaching does not adversely affect gross anatomy learning outcomes.

Ultrasonography is increasingly used in medical education, but its impact on learning outcomes is unclear. Adding ultrasound may facilitate learning, but may also potentially overwhelm novice learners. Based upon the framework of cognitive load theory, this study seeks to evaluate the relationship between cognitive load associated with using ultrasound and learning outcomes.

Are we at risk of groupthink in our approach to teamwork interventions in health care?

Context: The incidence of medical error, adverse clinical events and poor quality health care is unacceptably high and there are data to suggest that poor coordination of care, or teamwork, contributes to adverse outcomes. So, can we assume that increased collaboration in multidisciplinary teams improves performance and health care outcomes for patients?

Methods: In this essay, the authors discuss some reasons why we should not presume that collective decision making leads to better decisions and collaborative care results in better health care outcomes.

Results: Despite an exponential increase in interventions designed to improve teamwork and interprofessional education (IPE), we are still lacking good quality data on whether these interventions improve important outcomes.

The attributes of an effective teacher differ between the classroom and the clinical setting.

Most training programs use learners' subjective ratings of their teachers as the primary measure of teaching effectiveness. In a recent study we found that preclinical medical students' ratings of classroom teachers were associated with perceived charisma and physical attractiveness of the teacher, but not intellect. Here we explored whether the relationship between these variables and teaching effectiveness ratings holds in the clinical setting.

Working memory, reasoning, and expertise in medicine-insights into their relationship using functional neuroimaging.

Clinical reasoning is dependent upon working memory (WM). More precisely, during the clinical reasoning process stored information within long-term memory is brought into WM to facilitate the internal deliberation that affords a clinician the ability to reason through a case. In the present study, we examined the relationship between clinical reasoning and WM while participants read clinical cases with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Hemispheric activation differences in novice and expert clinicians during clinical decision making.

Clinical decision making requires knowledge, experience and analytical/non-analytical types of decision processes. As clinicians progress from novice to expert, research indicates decision-making becomes less reliant on foundational biomedical knowledge and more on previous experience. In this study, we investigated how knowledge and experience were reflected in terms of differences in neural areas of activation.