UMMS

School of Education: Professional Education

The Department of Medical Education provides academic credit for a set of courses leading to a Master’s Concentration in Medical and Professional Education provided through the University of Michigan College of Education. Courses include:

Introduction to Professional Education
Instructional Methods in Professional Postsecondary Education: Theory and Application
Assessment and Measurement in Educational Settings
Expertise
Program Evaluation

Introduction to Professional Education
Developed by Casey B. White, Ph.D., and Hilary M. Haftel, M.D.

Students in this course will explore professional education in the U.S., including medicine, dentistry, law, business, nursing and pharmacy. Topics include:

Accreditation and governance
Curriculum
History of professional education
Internship and practice
Legal issues
Policy and funding

Students will participate in a constructivist approach to learning the material, in which the approaches will be active and will include peer sharing and teaching, and peer feedback. Experts in each of the fields present underlying theories and practices related to education in specific disciplines, and students learn through interactive presentations accompanied by in-class activities and an out-of-class project chosen by each student.

The goal of the course is to introduce students to the disciplines that comprise professional education, and to the educational methods and the current management, legal and policy issues within each of the disciplines.

Contact: Casey B. White, Ph.D., and Hilary M. Haftel, M.D.

Instructional Methods in Professional Postsecondary Education: Theory and Application
Developed by Casey B. White, Ph.D., and Caren M. Stalburg, M.D.

Professional education, with its focus on introducing students to simulated and authentic environments in which they will practice, has historically employed active, practice-based learning formats that include internships, clerkships, interactions with standardized patients/clients, computer- and mannequin based simulation, and case- or problem-based learning.

The goal of this course is to introduce students to research and theory underlying these active, practice-based instructional methods and to the application of these methods across higher and professional education including medicine, dentistry, nursing, law and pharmacy. Along with this broad, multidisciplinary approach to the course material, students also will study in depth a particular discipline and the common instructional methods within that discipline. Learning methods will be active and student-centered, and will include peer teaching, peer feedback and self-assessment.

Contact: Casey B. White, Ph.D., and Caren M. Stalburg, M.D.

Assessment and Measurement in Educational Settings
Developed by Larry D. Gruppen, Ph.D.

This course offers a strong theoretical, conceptual and practical foundation related to educational assessment and evaluation. The primary goal of the course is providing students with assessment and evaluation tools that will be relevant to and useful in their future careers.

The course is highly student-centered; we expect students to participate in and contribute to a variety of activities.

Early in the term, each student defines a project drawn from his or her own goals and current or anticipated applications. The project guides how we examine and apply a range of assessment and evaluation methods that target learner knowledge and understanding, attitudes and beliefs, and skills.

Course topics include:

Educational theories related to learning and assessment
Connections between intended learning outcomes and assessment,
Reliability and validity
Technical underpinnings of high quality assessment
Constructing assessment instruments
Standard setting and grading
Cultural and ethical issues in assessment

Students will examine assessment and evaluation issues and skills that are relevant through the entire spectrum of education (K-12, higher education, professional education and continuing education).

Contact: Larry D. Gruppen, Ph.D.

Expertise
Developed by Larry D. Gruppen, Ph.D., and R. Brent Stansfield, Ph.D.

Much of education in post-secondary and professions education is fundamentally focused on developing expertise in a specific domain of knowledge and skills. Although a variety of educational methods and curricular designs may be appropriate for this goal, it is critically important that educators understand the nature and development of expertise as a cognitive and social phenomenon.

In this course, students will review critical literature in research and theory on expertise and will examine the implications this has for educational efforts to develop expertise. Each class participant will identify a specific content domain (e.g., teaching, dentistry, music, troubleshooting) which will they use as a means of applying the course content. Participants will use this domain to analyze educational practice and design a research study to investigate that form of expertise. This application will enable the participant to develop skills in critically analyzing the characteristics of the domain and how educational interventions can be designed to facilitate the development of expertise. The class will be highly interactive, with participants and faculty sharing insights and observations from their own areas of expertise.

Contact: Larry D. Gruppen, Ph.D., and R. Brent Stansfield, Ph.D.

Program Evaluation
Developed by Patricia B. Mullan, Ph.D.

This course offers a conceptual and practical introduction to program evaluation. The course will make extensive use of recent applied examples of evaluations drawing from a wide range of applications.

Students will examine techniques for involving stakeholders in the planning process, identifying questions that evaluations can address, selecting evaluation strategies, anticipating ethical challenges, and reporting and disseminating evaluation findings. The course will include examples of quantitative and qualitative methods used in program evaluation. We will examine the rationale and standards for assessing outcomes, effectiveness and quality of evaluations.

Students critically examine examples of prominent program evaluation models to promote their ability to choose models that anticipate barriers and decisions important to stakeholders.

The course does not assume or require that students have previous coursework or experience in program evaluation, research design or statistics.

Goals include:

Enhancing students’ knowledge and skills in identifying major purposes and approaches for conducting program evaluation
Providing students with opportunities to apply standards to program evaluations in order to determine the utility, practicality, appropriateness and accuracy of program evaluations

Contact: Patricia B. Mullan, Ph.D.