Curriculum Research Solutions: Shifting From “Did It Work Locally?” to Contributing to a Scholarly Conversation

Health professions educators frequently seek to study their curriculum (e.g., a new or revised curriculum for a degree-granting program, a component of that curriculum, or a stand-alone course). Despite local enthusiasm, curriculum-focused studies are often hard to publish and have been repeatedly discouraged. Yet, few authors have proposed practical solutions. The purpose of this article is to articulate common problems with curriculum research and to propose specific ways in which curriculum research can be accomplished (and published) successfully. The authors define "research " as the rigorous, systematic pursuit of new knowledge with the intent to disseminate findings in a peer-reviewed forum. They delineate 5 problems with curriculum-focused research as it is typically done: redundancy (failing to build on prior research), context-specificity, confounding and dilution, superficiality (using data sources of convenience), and conceptual obscurity (failing to employ a relevant conceptual framework). To address these problems, they encourage researchers to stop focusing on their local curriculum and instead join and contribute meaningfully to a global scholarly conversation. Engaging in a scholarly conversation involves listening to the conversation (the literature) to understand what is already known, identifying a gap the researcher can fill with a useful observation, and asking and answering a question that other people will find relevant (to their own local needs), novel (not already known), insightful (shedding light on future action), and credible (well-supported by chosen methods). The authors outline 6 prototypical potentially successful curriculum-focused research studies, including quantitative and qualitative approaches, and cite published examples. They also highlight studies to avoid. They conclude by discussing practical considerations: appraisal of research quality, funding of education research, accessing and acquiring needed research skills, measuring provider behaviors and patient outcomes, ethical issues associated with learners as study participants, and tensions between basic and applied research.