Using contribution analysis to evaluate health professions and health sciences programs.

Introduction/background: Course evaluation in health education is a common practice yet few comprehensive evaluations of health education exist that measure the impact and outcomes these programs have on developing health graduate capabilities.

Aim/objectives: To explore how curricula contribute to health graduate capabilities and what factors contribute to the development of these capabilities.

Methods: Using contribution analysis evaluation, a six-step iterative process, key stakeholders in the six selected courses were engaged in an iterative theory-driven evaluation.

Lessons learned from piloting mHealth informatics practice curriculum into a medical elective.

Introduction: This case study reports the development and delivery of an mHealth elective piloted for first-year undergraduate medical students at Monash University (Australia) and the lessons learned by designers.

Results: The students were not as adept at using mHealth devices as the literature had predicted. Expert speakers using mHealth for practice perceptibly engaged students.

Governance and assessment in a widely distributed medical education program in Australia.

The learning objectives, curriculum content, and assessment standards for distributed medical education programs must be aligned across the health care systems and community contexts in which their students train. In this article, the authors describe their experiences at Monash University implementing a distributed medical education program at metropolitan, regional, and rural Australian sites and an offshore Malaysian site, using four different implementation models. Standardizing learning objectives, curriculum content, and assessment standards across all sites while allowing for site-specific implementation models created challenges for educational alignment.

The influence of language family on academic performance in Year 1 and 2 MBBS students.

Objectives: Generally, in most countries around the world, local medical students outperform, in an academic sense, international students. In an endeavour to understand if this effect is caused by language proficiency skills, we investigated academic differences between local and international MBBS students categorised by native language families.

Methods: Data were available and obtained for medical students in their first and second years of study in 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2006.