Making medical education research more theoretically robust

We at Academic Medicine Education Institute (AM•EI) are very honoured and excited at having a new – and our very own – section in the Proceedings of Singapore Healthcare focusing on important education issues. By a happy coincidence, our inaugural editorial is published in the same month the second SingHealth-Duke NUS Education Conference is convened (25–26 September 2015). Thus, we thought it would be timely for us to begin the conversation on one of the tracks we are featuring at the conference – Conceptual Frameworks and Medical Education Research.

Some readers might ask: Why the need to focus on research? After all, the clarion call for making medical education research theoretically robust is not recent but one that is more than a decade old.^1,2 However, as recent literature has shown,^3–5 educational scholarship continues to lack rigour. There is a need to train the spotlight on the importance for scholars to enhance their research efforts with conceptual frameworks informed by established theories, so that our educational scholarship enterprise can be strengthened.

There are many benefits to using and making explicit our conceptual frameworks. First, such an approach can ‘illuminate and magnify’ our research in a way that deepens our understanding of a studied phenomenon: ⁶ we can go beyond exploring the more shallow ‘what has been done?’ to the more sophisticated level of asking ‘why do we do it?’ and ‘how does it work?’ questions. There is a whole body of educational, cognitive research (theories) that govern behaviour, motivation and learning that can (nay, should) guide educational efforts. This will enable the transformation of a ‘personal or local idea or problem into a research problem of general interest’, ⁷ which is an effective way to guard against our research efforts becoming what has been disparagingly described as dustbowl empiricism, ⁸ where discrete but voluminous data and observations crowd out a coherent view which will explain the studied phenomenon in a meaningful fashion. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, using a conceptual framework in our studies might help us incubate more original research ideas as established theories are more likely to be expanded because we are looking for answers to address a research gap.

In this light, the offerings under the research track at this year’s Education Conference potentially have the power to transform the way we conduct research going forward. As the organizers in charge of the research track, we hope to start the conversation within our scholarly community about theories and conceptual frameworks by first dispelling any fears or worries with such abstruse-sounding terms as ontology, epistemology and methodology. We are determined not to let semantics get in the way of our doing meaningful and perhaps even ground-breaking research work. Post-conference, AM•EI will continue supporting the SingHealth-Duke NUS community by running educational research workshops to guide those interested in pursuing educational research.

Our ultimate goal is to build a community of scholarly educators who bring quality exploration to scholarly research efforts. So come and join us at both the conference and workshops which will follow. Details of the conference are available at https://www.academic-medicine.edu.sg/educationconference2015/. Workshop information will be shared through AM•EI email blasts.