October 2007

AAMC Presentation

Neil, Jen, and David presented their mini-workshop for the Association of American Medical Colleges' presentation. It is titled, Empowerment Evaluation: A Collaborative Model for Evaluating Medical School Curriculum and Enaging Accreditation Standards.

The opportunity to practice this workshop was invaluable. The group provided useful advice, ranging from trimming down the student comments in the package to adding more detail about the "limbs on the evaluation tree."

The laminated cards, highlighting the empowerment evaluation concepts we want workshop participants to use, were a "hit."

As you can see from the picture above, they finally got me. I am the one who typically takes pictures of everyone for the blog. This time, turn-around was fair play. (I should note these pictures are used to help us record our efforts throughout the year.)

We are all getting close the actual conference presentations at the AAMC and also at the American Evaluation Association, thus the marathon of mock presentations to prepare for the actual events in early November (November 2-7 at AAMC and November 7-11 at AEA).

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International Speaker

Maria, from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, spoke today.

The focus of her talk was on the accuracy of student self-assessment. The findings were powerful (almost statistically significant after running a two-tailed T test).

The second speaker was Sylvia from Stanford. The focus of her talk was on "Fostering Compliance of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act: An Educational Program."

Both presentations invited comments and a critical eye. The group immediately launched into both talks with insightful comments designed to better understand the concepts presented and to help the presenter improve their research and presentation.

As usual the conversation went past the designated hour and into the lunch zone.

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