Voices of U of U Health
Helping Faculty Turn Teaching Questions Into Medical Education Research
By Candace Chow, PhD
Every day, faculty educators notice things that make them curious about how students learn. A new classroom activity seems to spark engagement, but does it actually improve learning? Students speak freely in one clinical setting but hesitate in another. What makes the difference?
Questions like these can become the starting point for meaningful medical education research. In my work with faculty at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah, I see a strong desire to understand what works, what doesn’t, and why. Our faculty are accomplished physicians and scientists who care deeply about education. What they may lack is experience studying how people learn or the protected time to turn a promising question into rigorous research.
The Eccles Medical Education Research Scholar Program gives faculty the time and guidance to take those questions further. Scholars receive 0.1 FTE for one year and one-on-one mentorship to design, conduct, and share a medical education research project aligned with their interests.
Giving Faculty Time and Training for Medical Education Research
In collaboration with my colleague Jorie Colbert-Getz, PhD, we set out to create a program that would help faculty complete a project while developing skills they could apply to future research. In conversations with education researchers at another institution, one need kept coming up: time. Many faculty producing this work had carved out time through a master’s or doctoral program to study research methods and complete projects.
Our faculty were pursuing similar questions while balancing teaching, clinical work, research, administration and service. The Eccles Medical Education Research Scholar Program offers protected time and surrounds faculty with practical support from the first question through publication. Scholars complete courses through the Association of American Medical Colleges' Medical Education Research Certificate program. These courses build foundational skills for developing research questions, reviewing literature, selecting methods, and preparing work for publication.
Individual coaching helps scholars apply those lessons to their own projects. We work through the details: What question are you trying to answer? What has already been studied? What information should you collect? How will you analyze it? What theory might help explain what you find?
The cohort also meets to share work in progress, learn from colleagues, and set aside focused writing time. Faculty already know how to write, and many are well published in clinical or basic science research. Medical education journals, on the other hand, may use different methods, language, and expectations. The program builds structure and accountability into the full process, including the submission of a conference abstract and first-author manuscript.
Choosing Research Methods to Understand Student Learning
Like clinical and basic science research, medical education research examines not only whether something works, but how and why. What often differs is the setting, the available evidence, and the methods needed to answer the question.
It can be difficult to create a control group in a classroom or reproduce the same experience for two groups of students. Test scores and surveys may tell us part of the story. We may also need to understand what students discussed, how they reasoned, and what they learned from one another. An interview, focus group, observation, or open-ended question may reveal more than a survey alone.
One earlier project began with a classroom activity called paper puzzles. About 110 students worked in small groups and rotated through stations, matching numbers with a chest X-ray at one station and pairing anatomical images with labels at another. The room was active, and the students appeared engaged. The faculty who created the activity still wanted to know whether it supported learning.
To examine that question, we conducted focus groups and drew on social learning theory and metacognition, or how people think about their own thinking. This allowed us to explore what students discussed and gained from working through the puzzles together. The question moved beyond whether students enjoyed the activity to what learning was taking place.
From First Cohort to a Culture of Education Research
The inaugural cohort for the Eccles Medical Education Research Scholar Program began in July 2026, with four scholars representing four departments: Johanna Purdy, MD (internal medicine); Kirstyn Brownson, MD (surgery); Katherine Hastings, MD (pediatrics); and Morgan Nelson, PhD (biochemistry). They are creating individualized learning plans, refining their research questions, and beginning their research training.
By the end of the program, each scholar is expected to design and implement a project, submit at least one conference abstract, and submit a first-author manuscript. Those milestones show that each scholar has carried the work from an initial question through sharing the results.
These four projects are an important beginning. Our longer-term goal is to build medical education research capacity across the school. Within five years, we hope these scholars will be leading new projects; mentoring students, trainees, and faculty who are newer to education research; and helping colleagues pursue questions of their own.
The questions faculty educators ask today can shape how we teach tomorrow. Giving them the time, skills, and support to pursue those questions can continue improving how we teach and learn.
