Leading change: Curriculum reform in graduate education in the biomedical sciences

Abstract

The Division of Graduate Medical Sciences at the Boston University School of Medicine houses numerous dynamic graduate programs. Doctoral students began their studies with laboratory rotations and classroom training in a variety of fundamental disciplines. Importantly, with 15 unique pathways of admission to these doctoral programs, there were also 15 unique curricula. Departments and programs offered courses independently, and students participated in curricula that were overlapping combinations of these courses. This system created curricula that were not coordinated and that had redundant course content as well as content gaps. A partnership of key stakeholders began a curriculum reform process to completely restructure doctoral education at the Boston University School of Medicine. The key pedagogical goals, objectives, and elements designed into the new curriculum through this reform process created a curriculum designed to foster the interdisciplinary thinking that students are ultimately asked to utilize in their research endeavors. We implemented comprehensive student and peer evaluation of the new Foundations in Biomedical Sciences integrated curriculum to assess the new curriculum. Furthermore, we detail how this process served as a gateway toward creating a more fully integrated graduate experience, under the umbrella of the Program in Biomedical Sciences. V C 2015 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 43(2):126-132, 2015.Keywords: graduate education; curriculum reform; biomedical science; interdisciplinary; doctoral education Introduction Doctoral education has been based on an apprentice model in the biological sciences for many decades; however, even given this practical emphasis on the applied science, it has still been noted that, "We should focus less on the production of PhDs and more on the production of scientists. They are not necessarily the same thing" [1]. Certainly, the apprentice model does run the risk of producing graduates with highly specialized knowledge about their area of expertise with little appreciation of the context of their work [2]. Moreover, there has been a national call toward moving our scientific educational programs in an interdisciplinary direction, and much of the initial focus of these efforts has been at the undergraduate level [3,4]. However, a shifting funding landscape toward interdisciplinary and translational science [5] has helped to catalyze discussions on teaching science as an integrated process of inquiry that is less concerned with discipline-specific facts [6,7].As this educational movement has filtered into the arena of graduate education, a number of proposals have been put forth from encouraging curriculum fellows to develop integrated graduate courses [8,9] to developing graduate-level laboratory courses [10]. What these interventions have in common is a focus on developing interdisciplinary educational opportunities that apply to the research paradigm in which graduate students will be embedded [11][12][13]. In...

The art and science of selecting graduate students in the biomedical sciences: Performance in doctoral study of the foundational sciences

“…Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) recently engaged in a substantial revision of the core doctoral curriculum [ 10 ] in which the majority of PhD students in the Division of Graduate Medical Sciences (GMS) are participants. This Foundations in Biomedical Sciences (FiBS) curriculum was designed to help students develop the expected competencies of professional scientists, especially in terms of critical thinking and interdisciplinary approach to science.…”

“…This Foundations in Biomedical Sciences (FiBS) curriculum was designed to help students develop the expected competencies of professional scientists, especially in terms of critical thinking and interdisciplinary approach to science. With our cohort of students entering this defined, uniform curriculum, we chose to explore whether there were data collected during admissions that could be associated with a student’s performance during the required formal didactic interdisciplinary scientific portion of their graduate training [ 10 ]. Because of the centralized structure of the admissions process and the core doctoral curriculum at BUSM, the school is especially well-positioned to evaluate correlations between admissions criteria and academic performance during the first year of graduate school in our student cohort.…”

Inter-related issues that impact motivation in biomedical sciences graduate education

“…For such attitudes and restructuring to happen, a paradigm shift in mindset is needed, which must percolate beyond supervisors to senior academic and research administrators as the latter determine the reward and recognition policies that shape the behaviours and attitudes of the former. Only then, will different stakeholders come together and form a partnership in order to reform and restructure the curriculum (Dasgupta, Symes, & Hyman, 2015).…”

“…They require authentic and transformational leadership to tune in to the needs and aspirations of the students and trainees, match them to Singapore's needs of tomorrow, reduce redundancies and take care of human sensitivities. Some of the key changes include having more structured graduate and early training programs so that students and trainees are aware of how they are going to be taught, what they will learn, and how they can actively contribute towards their learning with clear objectives and end goals in mind (Bosch, 2018;Dasgupta et al, 2015). Secondly, it is time to put the 'philosophy' back into the 'Doctor of Philosophy' (Bosch, 2018).…”

“…Hence, we need to pause, reflect, soul-search, articulate and redefine what graduate education and early career training in biomedical sciences is really all about (Bosch, 2018). There are many worldviews concerning higher education and training but we need to get back to basics, which are for graduate education and early training to be broad, holistic and interdisciplinary to create thinkers, not just doers (Dasgupta et al, 2015;Lorsch & Nichols, 2011). Not only will this create biomedical scientists who are able to think more critically and thoughtfully, it will also enhance the retention rate of graduates in biomedical sciences research.…”