Procedure for deciding on approaches to data collection to inform recommendations about curriculum revision: John Gazewood reported on the results of his e-mail poll of the members of the Principles of Medicine Committee in which he asked for a ALas Vegas@ style vote on a wide range of possible approaches to gathering information that could help the committee make recommendations on curriculum revision.  The top ranked items were:

A.  Seek information from the Clerkship Directors on what changes they would like to see in the first two years of the curriculum (8 votes).

B.  Ask the Student Medical Education Committee (SMEC) to make recommendations of their ideal 1^st and 2^nd year curriculum (8 votes).

C.  Have each course identify medical student advisors to give feedback on that course (8 votes).

D.  Implement a searchable curriculum database (7 voted).

E. Do a review of other medical schools that underwent a recent medical curriculum change (6 voted).

F. Review national criteria in the area of medical education (AAMC,  LCME, etc.)(6 votes).

A wide ranging discussion of these issues ensued:

A. It was pointed out that John Jackson recently sent out an e-mail to all course directors bringing their attention to the new feature of the Course Content Management System that facilitates searching across handouts and Powerpoint presentations on the course web sites. Go to the course web page that lists all the course subjects.  At bottom of the page is a link to ASearch Course Documents@.  The search engine supports Boolean operators and certain wildcards.  There was a discussion of the relationship between John=s search engine versus a true curriculum database (such as Joel Hockensmith=s suggestion). It was felt that John Jackson may be able to enhance his search tool to fulfill some of these goals. One suggestion was to ask John to add a feature to his Content Management tool that would allow someone to add a keyword (from a drop-down menu) at the time a handout or Powerpoint is posted on the course web site.  It was decided to invite John Jackson to speak at a future meeting of the Curriculum Committee and to demo his search tool.

Gene Corbett, while on sabbatical at the AAMC visited a number of medical schools and became aware of a sophisticated curriculum mapping software program at Vanderbilt called @KnowledgeMap@.  The people there gave him an access password.  Interested individuals could contact Gene about reviewing this web site.

B. The committee felt that we should definitely move ahead with getting feedback from Clerkship directors on the Year 1 and 2 curriculum.

C. The committee felt SMEC should be asked to conduct a review of the 1^st and 2^nd year curriculum and make recommendations.  It was pointed out that this overlaps with other on-going effort that involve student input (such as the Design and Development Teams) but the committee did not feel this was a problem.

D. Wendy Golden pointed out that she is going ahead with utilizing selected first year students as advisors for her course Medical and Molecular Genetics.  It was pointed out that we have a number of 4^th year Teaching Electives on the books and  this is another way to get student feedback on specific courses.  The advantage to this approach is that the 4^th year students have a unique perspective on the 1^st and 2^nd year courses because they have completed the entire basic sciences curriculum as well as the 3^rd year Clinical Clerkships.

E.  In terms of national criteria, committee members are referred to the following web sites: