5. Research
5aDevelop research skills and engage in scholarship activities in an effort to advance understanding and practice of education in the health professions.
5bAnalyze empirical data to support the theories of effective teaching, adult learning, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Artifact 5a-A
AI-Augmented Gamification as a Tool for Interactive Medical Student Education
Reflection
The purpose of this assignment in HPTT 830 – Research Analysis and Design for Health Professions Education was to produce a complete research proposal, covering the introduction, problem statement, purpose statement, research questions, literature review, and methodology. I selected it to represent competency 5a because the proposal shows my research skills best, and because the topic grew out of a curricular gap I had previously identified. As well, the project idea and design took inspiration from earlier HPTT courses.
Pan and colleagues found that only 22% of surveyed students reported exposure to a hepatology rotation, and Kobashigawa and colleagues predict a 35% shortage of adult transplant hepatologists by 2033. 62% of transplant hepatology fellowship positions were unfilled in 2024, further compounding the workforce shortage. I also drew on my own unpublished 2025 survey of medical school curricular deans, which found that 57.1% of liver-transplant-affiliated schools weighted preclinical hepatology content equivalently to other specialties compared with 28.6% at non-affiliated schools, and that fewer than 40% of either group reported any lecture on liver transplantation. As a transplant hepatologist, these findings inspired me to develop a game with artificial intelligence (AI) integration to teach medical students about liver disease complications, and potentially increase specialty career interest. The proposal sets out one primary and three secondary research questions across a three-site study design.
One of the challenges encountered was taking a three-site design through the institutional review board. I have since narrowed it to a single-site quality improvement pilot, keeping the same game, objectives and aims while reducing only the scope of the initial deployment, with multi-site expansion planned once the intervention is established. The game, Hepatology Night Shift (opens in a new tab), is now built and is undergoing final testing before I implement the project in Fall 2026.
Artifact 5a-B
Article Critique 1: Mandatory Hepatology Education for Internal Medicine Residents
Reflection
This assignment in HPTT 830 – Research Analysis and Design for Health Professions Education asked me to critically appraise a published study, covering its design, sampling, intervention, assessment tools, findings and limitations. I chose Mikolajczyk and colleagues’ 2021 study of mandatory hepatology education for internal medicine residents. I selected it to represent competency 5a as critical appraisal of published literature is an important research skill, and because this study is pertinent to my career interests in building the hepatology workforce and trainee hepatology education.
The study is a single-center quantitative design running from 2014 to 2018, creating a mandatory two-week inpatient hepatology rotation with a complementary didactic curriculum, compared against historical data from a similar cohort at the same institution. My strongest criticism is related to study design, i.e., the intervention is inpatient only, while hepatology is a predominantly outpatient specialty, so measuring specialty interest after a one-sided clinical experience may not fully reflect the study aim. Regarding educational theory, the supplement credits Kolb’s experiential learning cycle with directing study design and intervention, but the reader has to extrapolate which resident responsibility maps to which of the four steps, and learners performing below expectations are unaccounted for in the curricular design.
One of the challenges encountered was critiquing a study based on educational theory rather than on its methods and design. Mikolajczyk and colleagues work with internal medicine residents, a population my own supplemental educational track for medical students does not reach, so my goal is to extend the Enhanced Medical Education Track beyond medical school into residency.
Artifact 5b-A
Article Critique 3: Palliative Care Always: Hepatology
Reflection
Article Critique 3, completed in HPTT 830 – Research Analysis and Design for Health Professions Education, appraises DeNofrio and colleagues’ 2022 report on Palliative Care Always: Hepatology, a twelve-week online course training hepatologists in primary palliative care. The course ran as eleven modules on Stanford University’s edX platform, was completed by thirty-nine providers across ten clinical sites, and formed the educational arm of the larger PAL-LIVER trial. I selected this artifact to represent competency 5b because interdisciplinary collaboration is embodied in the study design and involves adult learners.
Most of the critique is an argument about how the statistical findings are represented. The examination mean score rose from 85.9% to 91.3%, with a confidence interval of 2.8 to 9.2 and a p-value of 0.001. On a twenty-item test that difference is one additional question. The high pretest score, in a cohort where most participants had no formal palliative care training, points to an instrument that may not be sensitive enough to measure baseline knowledge, and no item development or validation is reported.
The strongest feature is the longitudinal design: practice patterns were reassessed at six, twelve and twenty-four months, with more than 80% of participants reporting palliative care skills in routine practice at one year. One of the challenges encountered was separating statistical significance from clinical significance. A p-value of 0.001 on a twenty-item multiple-choice test shows the improvement is unlikely to be chance, but the clinical implications seem minimal. This assignment has made me more careful about what a statistically significant result implies in practice, and I intend to carry that question into the evaluation of my own educational endeavors before treating a change in scores as evidence that the teaching worked.
Artifact 5b-B
Revised Literature Review: Gamification and Improving Hepatology Knowledge for Medical Students
Reflection
The Revised Literature Review, written for HPTT 830 – Research Analysis and Design for Health Professions Education, required a thematically organized survey of the evidence underpinning my study, and was revised and adapted based on faculty feedback. I selected it to sit alongside the article critique to represent this competency because the two do opposite kinds of analysis: the critique tests one study against its own design; the review synthesizes evidence across three themes.
The first theme is the learning needs of Generation Z, drawing on Eckleberry-Hunt and Shirazian and their colleagues: a la carte learning, individualized feedback, the flipped classroom, and digital natives who may lack the skills to judge what they find. The second is gamification in medical education, where Xu and colleagues reviewed fourteen games and Surapaneni thirty articles across four domains. The limitations identified matter: no published studies on long-term knowledge retention, no standardized evaluation metrics, most work confined to a single institution, and little empirical evidence for gamification in summative assessment. The third is the hepatology curricular status quo, anchored on Pan and colleagues, whose survey of sixty-five incoming internal medicine interns found them less comfortable managing chronic liver disease than other chronic conditions.
One of the challenges encountered was reconciling a contradiction between the articles I selected. Darmadi and colleagues found that a structured lecture on metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease improved resident confidence and quiz scores at p<0.001 in 111 of 125 residents, yet lecture-based teaching sits against the Generation Z learner preferences in my first theme. The flipped classroom is where the two findings meet and that reconciliation has driven my interest in online learning and in building e-modules to augment content that would otherwise be solely lectured.