Select one or more of the activities below to develop your skills in assessing educational and learning needs and setting educational objectives.
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1 Research study design

You have heard that there is going to be considerable grant money for improving patient safety. You have read in the BMJ that prescribing errors are running high, and that house officers are the main cause of this. Think through a series of research questions around an intervention study to address this problem and gain research funding. 

Think of the issues that would need to be addressed and the designs that would best suit each question. 

Brainstorm a little by triangulating as many methods as you can to explore one of the questions as fully as possible.

2 Planning a small-scale research study

Using some of the learning from this module and considering your own teaching context, plan the key features of a small-scale research study. Starting points might be:

• a topic that interests you
• an educational article or book chapter
• a planned educational change
• I wonder why that happened?
• I wonder what would happen if…?

Try to write down the research question (don’t worry if you can’t get it right at first), the project aims (sometimes easier), the design approach and main research methods, and a brief time plan.

If you were actually going to carry this research out, what else would you need to do?

3 Search strategies

Taking an educational research topic (either the topic that you considered in Activity 2 or another topic that interests you) plan a search strategy to find out what else has been published in this area.

If you are new to literature searching and have access to a library, library staff will be able to help you, or there are many resources available online (e.g. www.learnwebskills.com/search/) that have tutorials.

Think about your search terms, the journals/books you might need to search in and how you will refine your search (consider breadth and depth).

Have you identified any issues or barriers such as access to journals/publications or lack of knowledge about certain aspects of education?

Make an action plan as to how might you address these issues, identifying who can help you and a time frame.