Testing Your Test: Assessing the Quality of Test Items
Presenter: Veronica Michaelsen
March 17, 12 PM ET

For an assessment to be an acceptable measure of student learning, it must be a valid and reliable and contain high quality test items. But how can you determine if your assessment makes the grade? Psychometric and item analysis data are often provided and allow for a post-hoc analysis of an assessment and yet few of us have formal training on how to interpret these data. This web seminar will review the types of statistics that are generally provided, how these numbers are derived and the waysin which they can be interpreted. Participants will learn about some general guidelines used in determining the quality of test items as well as hear about some of the exceptions to those rules.

For more information or to register for the Spring Audio Seminar Series, click here.

Planning for Curriculum Mapping
Presenter: Dina Kurzweil
March 10, 12 PM ET

Curriculum mapping acts as a catalyst for opening up lines of communication among all educators. The use of curriculum mapping encourages leadership, faculty and staff to have conversations within their own department, school, and university, increasing collegiality and breaking down silos.

This session will introduce the audience to topics and conversations focusing on how curriculum mapping gets started. The session will provide some best practices, challenges, and things to consider before engaging in curriculum mapping. Finally we will discuss some of the hidden aspects and impacts of curriculum mapping.

For more information or to register for the Spring Audio Seminar Series, click here.

Instructional Design – Learning Objectives; Backwards Design, Blooms Taxonomy
Presenter: Michelle Yoon
March 3, 12 PM ET

It is often said that medicine and healthcare is both a science and an art. Likewise, teaching is often referred to as both a science and an art, and the same can said specifically in reference to teaching in medical science education, or health professions education. But before good teaching can occur, it is important to examine the process of developing of learning experiences through systematic instructional design.

“What do you want your students to know?” “What do you want them to be able to do?” “How do you gauge or calibrate the complexity of learning?” This web audio seminar will enable participants to thoughtfully answer these questions, by introducing them to the juxtaposed perspectives of the iterative 5-step Dick and Carey model, and Wiggins & McTighe’s Backward Design Model of instruction design (ID). The session will connect these instructional design paradigms to Bloom’s Taxonomy so that participants will be able to think globally about systematic instructional design in the context of cognition or learning domains.

Participants will be introduced to designing instruction in a methodical, step-by-step, iterative way that allows them to calibrate instruction involving varying levels of complexity. This session will also allow participants to see how designing good instruction can also begin with using learning objectives and goals as a guiding map to help design specific pieces of instruction. Participants will learn how good instructional design can–and should–bridge, or align, learning objectives with assessment in the instructional process.

For more information or to register for the Spring Audio Seminar, please click here.

How to Publish Your Results
Presenter: Peter de Jong
February 4, 12 PM ET

In publishing scholarly work, there are several opportunities available to present your results to a specific audience. One way of sharing your results is presenting at conferences on medical education. These conferences can be found at a national as well as an international level. The most common types of conference contributions are the oral and poster presentations. Presenting at a conference can be a good and maybe even the most appropriate way to publish your work. Another option is publication in a (scientific) medical education journal. For publishing in a journal, not only the writing skills of the author are important. At least as important is choosing the right strategy in submitting the work to the most appropriate journal. It is also useful to know how the Editorial Office and Editorial Board of a journal handle the manuscripts received. Knowledge of these last two aspects can significantly increase the chances for acceptance of the manuscript. The session will give the attendees more insight in the editorial processes of a journal and several concrete strategies to increase the chances of acceptance of their work. The presenter will showcase the internal procedures of IAMSE’s journal Medical Science Educator to explain the attendees what is happening behind the scenes of a journal. Some general advice will be given in order to make the process of submission as successful as possible. At the end of the session the participants will have a better understanding of ways to publish their results.

For more information or to register for the Winter Audio Seminar, please click here.