Medical education
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Medical schools in Western societies seek measures to increase the diversity of their student bodies with respect to ethnicity and social background. Currently, little is known about the effects of different selection procedures on student diversity. ⋯ The absence of differences on non-academic criteria was promising with reference to increasing social and ethnic diversity; however, the possibility that self-selection instigated by the selection procedure is stronger in applicants from non-traditional backgrounds cannot be ruled out. Further research should also focus on why cognitive tests might favour traditional applicants.
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Applicants to US residency training programmes are required to submit a personal statement, the content of which is flexible but often requires them to describe their career goals and aspirations. Despite their importance, no systematic research has explored common themes and gender differences inherent to these statements. ⋯ By applying textual analysis to material derived from a national cohort, we identified common narrative themes in the personal statements of future US physicians, noting differences between men and women. Together, these data provide novel insight into the dominant discourse of doctoring in this generation of students applying for further training in US IM residency programmes, and depict a diverse group of applicants with multiple motivations, desires and goals. Furthermore, differences seen between men and women add to the growing understanding of bias in medical education. Training programmes may benefit by adapting curricula to foster such diverse interests.
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Recent calls propose the conceptualisation of medical education research as 'an improvement science for complex social interventions'. This involves developing principled, yet contextually grounded, descriptions of health care practice that increase the likelihood of successful intervention. Defining what health professionals should be taught using theoretical perspectives and analytical techniques borrowed from human-centred systems engineering (HCSE) may acknowledge this call by allowing learning objectives and performance assessment criteria to be aligned with the demands of actual work. ⋯ Learning objectives and performance assessment criteria derived from an HCSE perspective target people's attunement to environmental conditions as they strive to enact goal-directed behaviour. Implementing educational interventions from an HCSE perspective should facilitate a sustained positive impact across contexts because theories of person-environment interaction enable principled adaptations of interventions to local circumstances.