The Origins of the Field of Medical Education Research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: This paper answers two related questions: When did the education of doctors become a subject for scientific inquiry? And what were the political and economic contexts, the worldviews, structures and events, that enabled the emergence and development of medical education research at that time and in that manner? METHOD: A detailed, concurrent, chronological textual analysis, with triangulation between textual form and contents, was conducted between 2006 and 2008. The primary texts were the complete volumes of the Journal of Medical Education (then the only journal in its field) from 1955 through 1959. Texts were analyzed within a theoretical framework grounded in the literature on interdisciplinary fields. RESULTS: In 1955, the academic medical community was just awakening to the possibility of medical education research; by 1959, it was institutionalized. Major factors contributing to its emergence included the increasing importance of scientific research generally, money for medical education research, the explosive growth of scientific knowledge, and growing calls for public accountability of medical education. CONCLUSIONS: Many factors led to the emergence of medical education research in the late 1950s within a particular sociohistorical context. The nature of research in this field, which is currently the subject of debate, is also of necessity historically situated and contingent, drawing on its roots in this era. A historical understanding will inform further analysis of the events, structures, and worldviews that underpin the definition(s) of legitimate knowledge production within the field of medical education research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.065 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".