1. Research, innovation, and evaluation, and framing inquiry
Scholarship in Health Education Research and Innovation (SHERI) course
Rachel H. Ellaway
Community Health Sciences Office of Health and Medical Education Scholarship

2. Health education is a field
No single theory, method, or approach
A meeting point for multiple concepts, practices, disciplines, perspectives:
Cognitivist - brains
Social constructivist
Systems
Philosophy, values
Practical and pragmatic focus on improving the training of physicians to improve health outcomes

3. A broad focus
Different levels (individual learning <> whole med-ed systems)
Different issues (what happens, how does it work, how can we improve it, how can we fix it, how do we respond to it …?)
Different values
Nomothetic – generalisable, global
Idiographic – context specific, local
Different philosophies
Measurement, explanation, prediction, generalism …
Strength in this eclecticism – and conflict

4. Scholarship Boyer’s model:
Scholarship of discovery (research, innovation)
Scholarship of integration (synthesis, cross-domain)
Scholarship of application (effectiveness)
Scholarship of teaching and learning (systematic evaluation and exploration)
Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, N.J: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

5. Quality in scholarship
Quality in educational scholarship is reflected in work that is peer-reviewed and publicly disseminated, and that provides a platform that others can build on.
[Canadian Association for Medical Education definition - paraphrased]

6. Scholarly practice Structured inquiry: Clear goals
Adequate preparation
Appropriate methods
Significant results
Effective presentation
Reflective critique
Glassick CE, Huber MR, Maeroff GI. Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate. 1997; San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

7. What is inquiry?
Develop knowledge, understanding in a focused and structured way
Organizing knowledge
Systematic enquiry
Exploring through experimentation
Testable and predictive models
Many ways to structure inquiry
Depends on assumptions about reality and knowledge

8. Approaches to inquiry: METRICS
Metascholarship Evaluation Translation Research Innovation Conceptual Synthesis

9. Ontology and epistemology
Ontology – the study of being
What exists, what is real, what do things have in common?
Epistemology – the study of knowledge, truth, belief
e.g. knowing how a car works vs knowing how to drive a car vs knowing how to build a car …
Difference: ‘does this exist?’ is ontology, ‘how can we understand this?’ is an epistemology
Both required in structured inquiry

10. Example
Ontology: does the [phenomenon] I am interested in really exist? What kind of thing is it? What other things is it like? Can I treat this thing in the same way?
Epistemology: what kinds of knowledge do we already have of this [phenomenon]? What kinds of knowledge do we need? How will we know and what will we know about it from this study/project?
Both have implications for theory and method …

11. Theory
“a set of interrelated constructs, definitions and propositions that presents a systematic view of phenomena by specifying relations among variables, with the purpose of explaining and predicting the phenomena”
Theory must be testable – confirmed or rejected consistently
Theories are provisional – trajectories towards truth
Two intersecting bodies of theory:
Theories of phenomena
Theories of inquiry
Kerlinger, F (1970). Foundations of behavioural research. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

12. The process of empiricism
Experience
Classification
Quantification
Discovery of relationships
Approximation to the truth
“the ultimate arbiter is not faith or utility or logic, or even truth, but the empirical world itself” Gorham, p52
Gorham, G (2009) The Philosophy of Science: A Beginner's Guide. Oneworld.

13. Theory and empiricism theory empiricism
“Theory without experience is empty, but experience without theory is blind” Immanuel Kant
Theory guides our approach to empiricism
Theory explains our empirical findings
theory
empiricism

14. Summary Scholarship sets standards for working in and around HPE
There are different dimensions of scholarship, different kinds of approaches
With training, anyone can adopt a scholarly stance
Inquiry is central to scholarship

15. Summary Ontology: what exists, what things are like
Epistemology: what we know, how we know it
Theory: propositions about how the world works
Empiricism: testing or generating knowledge based on real world experience
Theory and empiricism a necessary dyad
Many paradigms