A New Normal: Assessment Outcomes and Recommendations for Virtual Versus In-Person Curricula in Post-COVID-19 Times.

Introduction: COVID-19 response efforts that began in March 2020 prompted an urgent need to transition medical education from an in-person to a virtual format. Our aim is to provide evaluation of a virtual platform for a fully integrated curriculum to provide future guidance in teaching methods.

Materials And Methods: We used summative assessments and course evaluations from pre- and post-transition from in-person to virtual delivery of educational content to measure the impacts of this transition on student performance and perceptions.

Lessons Learned from ToxMSDT: A Pilot Innovative Toxicology Research Education Pipeline Program Targeting Underrepresented Undergraduate Students to the Field of Toxicology.

Toxicology, as a profession, lacks diversity. Undergraduate students, and especially underrepresented students, are not commonly introduced to toxicology at US colleges and universities. The Toxicology Mentoring and Skills Development Training Program (ToxMSDT) seeks to acquaint underrepresented undergraduates enrolled in STEM fields with toxicology fundamentals and skills to aid their entry into graduate programs and, ultimately, careers in toxicology.

Training in Urban Medicine and Public Health: TRIUMPH.

Purpose: The number of U.S. medical school graduates who choose to practice in health professional shortage areas (HPSAs) has not kept pace with the needs of society.

Integrative cases for preclinical medical students: connecting clinical, basic science, and public health approaches.

Background: Healthcare and public health systems are each transforming, resulting in a need for better integration between clinical and population-based approaches to improve the health of populations. These changes also demand substantial transformations in the curriculum for medical students. Integrative Cases were designed for all first- and second-year medical students to provide them with more awareness, knowledge, and skills in integrating public health into clinical medicine.

Diversifying Biomedical Training: A Synergistic Intervention.

For over three decades, the scientific community has expressed concern over the paucity of African American, Latino and Native American researchers in the biomedical training pipeline. Concern has been expressed regarding what is forecasted as a shortage of these underrepresented minority (URM) scientists given the demographic shifts occurring worldwide and particularly in the United States. Increased access to graduate education has made a positive contribution in addressing this disparity.

Utility of the AAMC's Graduation Questionnaire to study behavioral and social sciences domains in undergraduate medical education.

Purpose: The Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on social and behavioral sciences (SBS) indicated that 50% of morbidity and mortality in the United States is associated with SBS factors, which the report also found were inadequately taught in medical school. A multischool collaborative explored whether the Association of American Medical Colleges Graduation Questionnaire (GQ) could be used to study changes in the six SBS domains identified in the IOM report.

Method: A content analysis conducted with the GQ identified 30 SBS variables, which were narrowed to 24 using a modified Delphi approach.

LOCUS: immunizing medical students against the loss of professional values.

Introduction: The Leadership Opportunities with Communities, the Underserved, and Special populations (LOCUS) program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health is a longitudinal, extracurricular experience for medical students who wish to develop leadership skills and expand their involvement in community health activities during medical school. The program consists of a core curriculum delivered through retreats, workshops, and seminars; a mentor relationship with a physician who is engaged in community health services; and a community service project.

Methods: On-line surveys and interviews with current and past participants as well as direct observations were used to evaluate the effects of the program on participants.

IN SEARCH OF GENDER NEUTRALITY: Is Singular a Cognitively Efficient Substitute for Generic ?

With increasing frequency, writers and speakers are ignoring grammatical proscription and using the plural pronoun they to refer to singular antecedents. This change may, in part, be motivated by efforts to make language more gender inclusive. In the current study, two reading-time experiments demonstrated that singular they is a cognitively efficient substitute for generic he or she, particularly when the antecedent is nonreferential.

In Search of Complete Comprehension: Getting "Minimalists" to Work.

Three experiments illustrated that readers will not completely comprehend the sentences they read unless sufficiently motivated by situational demands. Complete comprehension of a topic is defined as the ability to accurately redescribe that topic in one's own words, and it entails three separate yet interdependent processing tasks: (a) activating the information contained in a topic, (b) resolving the topic as a new topic or as an anaphor referring to an old topic, and (c) modifying one's mental structures to organize the additional information that is received. Each process hinges on the outcome of those that preceded it, and comprehenders are not expected to initiate the next process in the sequence unless it is required or motivated by task demands.