Expertise, Time, Money, Mentoring, and Reward: Systemic Barriers That Limit Education Researcher Productivity—Proceedings From the AAMC GEA Workshop

摘要

Medical education scholarship has steadily increased over the past decades.1–3 Although this is encouraging, the literature also mentions a persistent need for further support of medical educators' efforts to develop and evaluate best practices for teaching, learning, and assessment.1,2,4–9 Medical education research is an applied field in which educators, clinicians, researchers, and administrators bring together diverse and complementary expertise, and there is the potential to conduct rigorous studies and move education forward in a scientific and evidence-based way. However, that diversity among stakeholders makes it difficult to determine how to best support medical education research efforts to ensure that those who wish to contribute can meaningfully do so. To address this issue, it is important to understand the barriers educators face in formulating, implementing, and publishing studies that seek to address important questions, educational problems, and unexamined assumptions. The literature highlights a variety of barriers that medical education scholars face in their research efforts, including lack of training programs, lack of protected time or funding, competing administrative and leadership roles, small numbers of learners, and difficulty in defining relevant, measurable outcomes.2,10–14 Zibrowski and colleagues15 explored lack of time as a barrier and found that although faculty felt most limited by a lack of protected time, fragmentation (finding only sporadic opportunities for work), prioritization (juggling competing roles), and motivation (due, in part, to perceptions that education scholarship is undervalued) contributed to these time constraints.15 Another piece of work from the same group of scholars recommended that efforts center on supporting education research, enhancing interactions among colleagues, and expanding faculty development activities.16 Both studies noted that research training alone may not change perceptions about the barriers posed by lack of time or support or increase research productivity. It is unclear whether these barriers represent a common experience across researchers and institutions, which barriers educators perceive to be the biggest obstacles to achieving their ideal level of research productivity, and what strategies they believe to be most effective in overcoming them. To further explore this important topic, we engaged a group of medical education research experts and educators in a consensus-building workshop at the 2013 Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) annual meeting. The purpose of the workshop was to answer the following questions: “What barriers do educators face in designing and publishing education research that is useful to consumers of that research, and what strategies could overcome those barriers?” In this article we describe the process and results from the consensus-building workshop.;Methods Literature Search Before the workshop, a small group of medical education scholars and researchers developed a preliminary list of potential barriers medical educators face in formulating, conducting, and publishing education research as well as proposed strategies for overcoming them. The list was based on a literature search for articles published from the beginning of 2000 through the end of 2013 using PubMed, ERIC, and Google Scholar using the following search terms: medical education research, educational research, barriers to educational research, medical education research barriers, and barriers to research in education. Additionally, the group included relevant articles from personal files and the reference sections of identified articles to further expand the search. The search yielded 17 articles, and after careful review, 7 articles were included that described barriers to medical education research.1–3,11–14 The group iteratively reviewed and revised the list of barriers and strategies to overcome them for completeness. This presession conte