Getting off the carousel: Exploring the wicked problem of curriculum reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Making substantial changes to the form and delivery of medical education is challenging. One reason for this may be misalignment between existing conceptualizations of curricula and curriculum reform in medical education, with the former perceived as 'complex' yet the latter as linear. Reframing curriculum reform as a process-driven, complex entity may enhance the possibility of change. To explore the utility of this approach, we carried out an exploratory case study of curriculum reform in a real-life context. METHODS: We used a qualitative case study approach. Data were collected from 17 interviews with senior faculty involved in curriculum reform in one medical school plus document analysis of approximately 50 documents and files, to provide background, context, and aid triangulation. RESULTS: Data coding and analysis was initially inductive, using thematic analysis. After themes were identified, we applied the 'wicked problem' framework to highlight aspects of the data. This paper focuses on two main analytic themes. First, that multiple players hold different views and values in relation to curriculum reform, resulting in various influences on the process and outcomes of reform. Second, 'solutions' generate consequences which go beyond the anticipated advantages of curriculum reform. DISCUSSION: This is the first empirical study of curriculum reform in medical education which uses the wicked problem framework to conceptually illuminate the complex processes which occur in relation to reform. Those involved in reform must be reflective and attentive to the possibility that persistent and emerging challenges may be a result of wicked problems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".