Response to Ten steps to health professional education research

We refer to our paper, ‘Ten steps to conducting health professional education research’. We wrote the paper to help clinicians conduct health professional education research because our experience is that many are unfamiliar with this field of research. To see whether the ten steps would be considered appropriate, we presented them at the Australia New Zealand Association of Health Professional Educators (ANZAHPE) conference in 2014. All who attended our session concurred with our aim of writing a response letter incorporating their feedback.

Overall, the attendees endorsed the ten steps and agreed that support to undertake education research benefits health professional educators; however, they suggested modifications, claiming that the ten steps focused on quantitative approaches to educational research and needed to incorporate qualitative approaches, which are also used in educational research, and have different methodologies and reporting standards.

Modifications suggested were that educators:

* learn to study the impact of an educational intervention on student learning through qualitative or quantitative approaches, rather than just designing outcome measures;
* ensure relevance, application and transferability of research, rather than focusing on international relevance;
* consider replicating and extending educational research conducted by others in different contexts;
* include an initial step highlighting the gap or problem that led to the research, then designing research questions that meet that gap.

We believe these suggestions increase the relevance of our ten steps.