JIAMSE 20-3 is now Available

Dear readers of JIAMSE,

I hereby present to you issue 20-3 of JIAMSE, the Journal of the International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE). Every article in this issue focuses on the role of the basic sciences in modern medical education. In 2006, IAMSE initiated the Flexner Revisited project to celebrate and recognize Abraham Flexner’s contributions to medical education by examining his findings for the basic sciences in the context of medical education for the 21st century. This year marks the centennial anniversary of the Flexner report and this issue of JIAMSE provides the culmination of several studies from this IAMSE project, brought together by Guest Editor Pat Finnerty.

Issue 20-3 is also the last issue of the IAMSE journal that will be published under the name of JIAMSE.  Starting January 2011, the peer reviewed journal of the association will be called Medical Science Educator.

Issue 20-3 is available at http://iamse.org/jiamse/public.htm

I hope you will enjoy this special and last issue of JIAMSE and I look forward welcoming you back in Medical Science Educator next year!

Peter G.M. de Jong, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief


If you are not a member of IAMSE yet and would like to follow our Journal in the future, consider applying for membership (visit www.iamse.org) or consider an individual Journal subscription (visit to apply www.MedicalScienceEducator.org/subscription.html)
 

JIAMSE Highlights - 20-2s "Preparing Healthcare Faculty for the Millennial Gneration"

Dear IAMSE Members,

I write to provide highlights from the Journal and last regular meeting of the Association in New Orleans. It was interesting to note at the IAMSE 2010 meeting that Dr. James B. McGee, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, delivered a unique keynote lecture entitled “Preparing Healthcare Faculty for the Millennial Generation.” His lecture has recently been published in JIAMSE, 20(2s):166-169. Dr. McGee writes about those born between the years 1984 and 2000, better known as the Millennial Generation, Generation Y or Echo Boomers. He observes that learning and teaching healthcare is different due to the contributing factors of technology and resultant impact on both learners and educators. The ‘millennials’ know life as a set of technological features, including the Internet, email, text messaging and other advanced forms of communication like teleconferencing via iChat, Skype, Google Wave, Adobe Connect, FreeConference or uStream. Their connections also include social networking on Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Twitter, Ning, Syndicaster, LinkedIn, Six Apart, hi5 and other websites. In short, these changes impact the classroom, requiring faculty educators to better hone their skill set(s) to those that lend credence to the use of digitized knowledge and problem solving methods. It is not enough to provide students with lecture handouts and a set of literature citations. . .better, of course, in today’s curriculum to ‘teach’ students where to find information and how to use it in deciphering complex healthcare problems. Millennial learners now have the expectation that all lectures be synchronized to slides “via the Internet within minutes of every lecture” and provided in multiple digital formats and varied languages so instant playback can be effected on laptops, iPods, iPads, iPhones and other handheld devices, including a plethora of smart phones. Dr. McGee concludes that “By understanding the unique characteristics and needs of millennial learners and embracing the valuable aspects of the technologies they know so well, modern [medical] educators can help them become the next great generation of healthcare professionals.”


Floyd C. Knoop, Ph.D.
Creighton University School of Medicine
Member, IAMSE Publication Committee
IAMSE Editorial Board

Highlights from JIAMSE 19-2

Dear IAMSE members and JIAMSE readers,

In the most recent regular issue of JIAMSE, 19:2 there are lots of good reading. For example there are 2 articles about students’ use of technology. One by Peter de Jong and Jan Bolk looks at the use of laptops over 4 years while another, by Anthony Paolo and colleagues looks at attitudinal changes of use of technology by a medical school. There is a piece by James Booth and colleagues about developing national core objective guidelines for Microbiology and Immunology. 2 articles focus on teaching specific topics. One by Darshana Shah and Betts Carpenter looks at use a mock malpractice trial and Bart Holland and Marian Passannnate report about effective teaching techniques for obniostatictics and epidemiology.

All this and more can be found in JIAMSE!

Good Reading!

Kitty McMahon
IAMSE Publication Committee member

JIAMSE 20-2s is Now Available - Special Annual Conference Issue

Dear IAMSE members,

I am proud to present to you JIAMSE supplement 20-2s on the scientific program of the IAMSE 2010 meeting. In addition to the abstracts of all poster presentations, we have also included the invited contributions of all three keynote presenters from the meeting: Dr. Mennin, Dr. McGee and Dr. Schuwirth. Furthermore, we have two Innovations by the two Outstanding Poster Award winners of this year, Dr. Carnegie and Dr. Thompson. Their work was rated as the best and most promising presented at this year's meeting and I am therefore very honored to present their work to you.

To access the Journal

I hope this issue of JIAMSE will give you a nice overview of the work presented at the IAMSE meeting in New Orleans.

Peter de Jong
Editor-in-Chief

Call for Manuscripts - Special Issue of MedSciEdu

Dear medical educators,

Medical Science Educator, the journal of the International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE), will publish in March 2011 a journal supplement entirely dedicated to basic science research projects for medical students. The issue will also publish the top-50 best abstracts of the 7th LIMSC International Conference on Student Research to be held in the Netherlands.

We are actively soliciting articles on the topic "(bio)medical research projects in the medical school curriculum". We like to learn more on how science research projects are incorporated into medical curricula around the world. Descriptive as well as research studies are welcome.

Please note that at this moment we are looking for IDEAS that you would like to personally prepare a manuscript for. From all the ideas received, we will select about 4 to 6 of which the submitter will be invited to submit a manuscripts to be reviewed.

These are the deadlines for this call:

October 1, 2010: Deadline for submitting ideas to journal@iamse.org
October 15, 2010: Selected authors will be invited to submit a manuscript
December 3, 2010: Deadline for submitting the manuscript
March 2011: Publication of the issue

Looking forward to your ideas.

Peter de Jong
Medical Science Educator
Editor-in-Chief

New Editor-in-Chief of JIAMSE

Peter de Jong, PhD, Named New Editor-in-Chief of JIAMSE

Effective July 1, 2010, the International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE) has named Peter de Jong, PhD, advisor at the Center for Innovation in Medical Education at the Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands, as the new Editor-in-Chief of JIAMSE. Dr de Jong succeeds Dr Uldis Streips, who did lead the journal for the last 4 years.

Dr de Jong is 45 years old and from the Netherlands. He has been trained in medical technologies and basics sciences (PhD in Biophysics/Physiology) at the universities of Eindhoven and Maastricht. Currently he is appointed at the Leiden University Medical Center in the field of using technology in education. In the past, Dr de Jong has been a member of the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee of the Netherlands Association for Medical Education NVMO and has been chairing several major (inter)national educational meetings. Also, he chaired for many years the NVMO Special Interest Groep on E-learning working on collaboration between all 8 medical schools in the country. Currently he is a member of the Board of Directors of IAMSE, which he will step down from as of July 1st when he takes office as Editor.

JIAMSE is the official peer-reviewed online journal of the International Association of Medical Science Educators and has been published since 1991. It is designed to present scholarly activities, opinions, and resources in basic medical science education for all who teach the sciences fundamental to medical practice. The journal presents opportunities to enhance excellence and innovations in teaching, student and program assessment, computer technology, human simulation, learner-centered education, and in many other areas. The journal is published four times a year with additional supplements. As of January 1, 2011 JIAMSE will be renamed and become Medical Science Educator: The Journal of the International Association of Medical Science Educators.

JIAMSE 20-1 Now Available

Hello to all JIAMSE readers. Volume 20-1 has been published. Good articles, good information, happy reading!

All best,
Uldis N. Streips, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief

Review of JIAMSE Issue 1 of Volume 20

To all IAMSE members,

With issue 1 of Volume 20 of our journal, JIAMSE www.jiamse.org about to be published, on the behalf of the Publications Committee I would like to bring your attention to Volume 19-4 by briefly reviewing a couple of the articles.

The first is an interesting Short Communication from Dekker and de Craen from Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands (p. 142-144). The authors report on a teaching experiment to assess the effect of promotional incentives on second-year medical student judgments regarding the credibility of information presented to them. In this short study, students in a second year class on scientific reasoning were randomly divided into two groups, one that received a promotional gift from the University and the other that did not. They were then presented information on nine slides regarding the evolutionary development of the nose. Four of the nine slides were fictional. Following the presentation, students were asked to assess the authenticity of the information. After analyzing the student answers, the authors found that students that received the promotional gift were four times more likely to believe the fictional slides that those who had not received the promotional gift. The authors conclude that even small promotional gifts can influence judgments of the credibility of information presented to them, and thus, promotional incentives are not harmless.

The second paper is from Wenger et al. at West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown, WV. In this IRB approved study, students near the end of their second year were asked to rank study resources they used to prepare for their pathology exams. These study resources included lecture attendance, viewing recorded lectures, textbook, practice with USMLE-type study questions, etc. The responses were linked with student’s cumulative score, and a bivariate fit analysis was used to compare the cumulative score with the utilization of study sources after anonymization. In this study, the authors found that those who utilized clinical vignette-type questions to practice performed on average 5 points higher than the class average, which was statistically significant. They also found that students who utilized recorded lectures over other resources scored on average 2.9 points lower than the class average, although this was not statistically significant.

The Publications Committee would like to encourage you not only to read JIAMSE, but also to submit your papers to JIAMSE for publication. In addition to Research Articles and Short Communications, other paths to publication in JIAMSE include short reviews of websites that may assist the medical educator (Medical Educators Resource Guide), Commentaries, Letters to the Editor, and publication of preliminary results of a novel approach to medical education as an Innovation.

William E. Seifert, Jr., Ph.D.
The University of Texas Medical School at Houston