Innovative Visualization of Curricular Integration Nathan Lau1, Chirag Bhatia1, Robert Lucito, Ph.D1 1Donald
and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell
Introduction A core tenet of the 1st 100 weeks curriculum at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine is its integrative nature, termed the “spiral curriculum.” This curriculum is centered around weekly themes, consisting of goals and learning objectives within PEARLS, which are then reinforced in MHDI large group sessions (LGS). The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) uses Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to organize its database of biomedical information. The MeSH thesaurus of terms is organized into a tree format based on similarity between terms. This allows for quantification of the degree of overlap between different terms. This project aims to extract MeSH terms from each week of the curriculum, determine the degree of overlap among weeks, and use this data to visually depict the integrative nature of the curriculum.
Results A
Results CPR PEARLS BI PEARLS FTB PEARLS HOM PEARLS CPR MHDI LGS BI MHDI LGS FTB MHDI LGS HOM MHDI LGS
B
C
D
E
Methods Goals and learning objectives from PEARLS cases and MHDI LGS from the MS1 curriculum were indexed by week using the NLM Medical Text Indexer (MTI) to generate relevant MeSH terms. Overlap between MeSH terms was quantified using the shared “branches” in MeSH tree numbers. These similarity scores were then graphed as circle plots using the circlize package in R.1
These plots demonstrate extensive overlap between PEARLS and MHDI LGS by week in MS1. Plots by course exhibit strong overlap with MHDI LGS from the same course. Notably, there is strong overlap between CPR PEARLS and HOM PEARLS and MHDI LGS.
A) Circle plot showing overlap between PEARLS cases by week with other PEARLS cases and MHDI LGS in MS1. Chords originate from PEARLS cases and are color matched to the week of origin. The thickness of the chord represents the strength of the overlap between the two linked weeks. B-E) Circle plots showing overlap between PEARLS cases from individual courses (CPR, BI, FTB, HOM) with the rest of the PEARLS cases and MHDI LGS in MS1.
Discussion/Future Directions We have developed a method to assess the level of integration between any component of the curriculum within any week with the rest of the curriculum and can identify areas of high as well as little overlap. This information can be used to identify parts of the curriculum that may be improved with more overlap. The analysis can be expanded to include Structure, PPS sessions, and the MS2 curriculum to determine the total overlap within the 1st 100 weeks. This approach could also be used at a smaller scale to perform detailed assessments of overlap within one course. Furthermore, this method can also be adopted by other schools or for other educational approaches.
References 1. Gu, Z., et al. (2014). "circlize Implements and enhances circular visualization in R." Bioinformatics 30(19): 2811-2812. Acknowledgements: Stephanie Lin