Resident Education Scholars Program

The Resident Education Scholars Program (RESP) is a joint initiative between Postgraduate Medical Education and the Office of Health and Medical Education Scholarship, designed to support and advance Cumming School of Medicine resident interest and expertise in educational scholarship.

Residents will develop their skills in health/medical education scholarship by either conducting educational research or developing an educational innovation.  This is achieved through a series of activities designed to support participants throughout their project development, as well as through mentorship from established scholars.

The program is currently in the pilot project phase, with the Anatomical Pathology, Anesthesiology, Internal Medicine, Neurology, Pediatrics, and Psychiatry programs participating.  It is anticipated that a full program will be launched in 2024.

Residents interested in applying to participate in the RESP should contact ohmes@ucalgary.ca.

The program takes a maximum of 2 years to complete, however each resident will progress according to their own pace and individual residency program requirements.  

Metascholarship: Activities that explore or reflect on the nature of scholarly activities. These can include bibliographic inquiry (such as publication patterns or trends), reflections on the nature of scholarship in a field (such as proposing a research agenda), or on the development of scholarship and scholarly activities.

Evaluation: Activities that explore the value or axiology of things. Evaluation activities often focus on supporting decision-making and practice rather than advancing the field at a more abstract level and generate value statements that are either binary (good/bad, pass/fail etc.), or based on a comparison of different states, or a continuum between two extremes.

Translation: Activities that translate practices or knowledge from one domain to another. These can include translating research findings into practice, translating concepts or perspectives from other disciplines to medical education, and translating concepts from one aspect of medical education to others, such as translating the OSCE model from assessment to admissions to create the MMI (Eva et al. 2009).

Research: Activities that focus on theory generation or testing. Research, in the context of this model, is framed as a more specific range of practices than is often the case in other circumstances when it is applied to mean any kind of systematic knowledge generation. Research can include any acts that are experimental, descriptive, or explanatory that involve a dialogical relationship between empiricism and theory.

Innovation: Activities that focus on creating new ideas and things including the development of new instruments, techniques, practices, or organizations (of things, people, and ideas). Innovation scholarship may be summative (focused on the products and outputs of innovation) or formative (focused on the processes and experiences of innovation). 

Conceptual: Activities that explore or develop the conceptual basis of a field. Examples include thought experiments, the deductive development of new models, concepts, and paradigms, critiques of exiting practices, thought and opinion papers, and reflection papers (such as Medical Education’s ‘when I say’ format). 

Synthesis: Activities that focus on existing knowledge and practice. These include any secondary activity (that synthesizes primary scholarly materials) or tertiary activity (that synthesizes other syntheses) as well as material on the nature of knowledge synthesis in general. Examples can include; literature reviews, scoping reviews, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses, as well as techniques for conducting effective acts of synthesis.