Thresholds of becoming: an exploration of threshold concepts as a means to support professional identity formation in competency-based curricula.

Inherent in every clinical preceptor's role is the ability to understand the learning needs of individual trainees, enabling them to meet their potential. Competency-based medical education frameworks have been developed to this end, but efforts to identify behaviours and activities that define competence are based on mapping knowledge, skills and ability, which can be difficult to integrate into a comprehensive picture of who the trainee is becoming. Professional identity formation, in contrast, prioritizes attention to who trainees are becoming, but provision of detailed guidance to preceptors on how to best support this form of development is challenging.

Before the scalpel: Exploring surgical residents' preoperative preparatory strategies.

Objective: This study sought to increase understanding of preoperative preparatory strategies utilised by senior surgical residents and identify how social and material forces come together to shape practice.

Summary/background Data: Preoperative preparation can play a powerful role in operative learning. Residents rarely receive guidance, feedback, or explicit expectations on how to prepare for the OR.

Relying on others' reliability: challenges in clinical teaching assessment.

Background: The quality of the data generated from internally created faculty teaching instruments often draws skepticism. Strategies aimed at improving the reliability and validity of faculty teaching assessments tend to revolve around literature searches for a replacement instrument(s).

Purpose: The purpose was to test this "search-and-apply" method and discuss our experiences with it within the context of observational assessment practice.

An exploration of faculty perspectives on the in-training evaluation of residents.

Purpose: The in-training evaluation report (ITER) is the most widely used approach to the evaluation of residents' clinical performance. Participants' attitudes toward the process may influence how they approach the task of resident evaluation. Whereas residents find ITERs most valuable when they perceive their supervisors to be engaged in the process, faculty attitudes have not yet been explored.

A randomized trial of pictorial versus prose-based medication information pamphlets.

Objective: The goal of this study was to compare prose and pictorial-based information pamphlets about the medication methotrexate in the domains of free recall, cued recall, comprehension and utility.

Methods: A single blind, randomized trial of picture versus prose-based information pamphlets including 100 participants aged 18-65 years of age, who had not completed high school, could read English, and had no prior knowledge about methotrexate. Superiority of pamphlet type was assessed using immediate free recall, cued recall and comprehension.

The sum of the parts detracts from the intended whole: competencies and in-training assessments.

Objectives: Despite the fact that Canadian residency programmes are required to assess trainees' performance within the context of the CanMEDS Roles Framework, there has been no inquiry into the potential relationship between residents' perceptions of the framework and their in-training assessments (ITA). Using data collected during the study of ITA, we explored residents' perceptions of these competencies.

Methods: From May 2006-07, a purposive sample of 20 resident doctors from internal medicine, paediatrics, and surgery were interviewed about their ITA experiences.

Rules of engagement: residents' perceptions of the in-training evaluation process.

Background: In-training evaluation reports (ITERs) often fall short of their goals of promoting resident learning and development. Efforts to address this problem through faculty development and assessment-instrument modification have been disappointing. The authors explored residents' experiences and perceptions of the ITER process to gain insight into why the process succeeds or fails.

'I don't have time': issues of fragmentation, prioritisation and motivation for education scholarship among medical faculty.

Objectives: Although lack of time has been frequently cited as a barrier to scholarship, there has been little inquiry into what specific factors medical faculty staff perceive as contributing to this dilemma. The purpose of the present study was to explore, in greater detail, lack of time as a barrier for faculty interested in pursuing education scholarship.

Methods: In 2004, as part of a cross-sectional, mixed-methods needs assessment, 73 (67.

Measuring resident well-being: impostorism and burnout syndrome in residency.

Background: Assessing resident well-being is becoming increasingly important from a programmatic standpoint. Two measures that have been used to assess this are the Clance Impostor Scale (CIS) and the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS). However, little is known about the relationship between the two phenomena.

Education scholarship: it's not just a question of 'degree'.

Background: Although medical faculty are frequently encouraged to participate in education scholarship, there is a paucity of literature addressing how to support those who wish to do so.

Aims: The purpose of this study was to explore faculty involvement in and support needs for pursuing education scholarship.

Methods: A purposive sample of 108 medical faculty with an interest in medical education were invited to participate in a two-phase, mixed-methods study (survey and focus groups).