Professional Development Statement
Research
As a student in the LDT Doctoral program my research is broadly focused on real-world problem solving and the design of problem solving learning environments. More specifically, I am currently interested in studying the naturalistic decision making of professionals working in complex, dynamic, and uncertain conditions in hopes of developing a conceptual foundation that can provide practical implications for instructional design.
As an instructional designer at the UGA College of Pharmacy, I hope to have specific impact in the area of pharmacy education, and therefore have proposed research to analyze pharmacists’ clinical decision making in hospital and out-patient practice settings, and to contextualize their decision making within the framework of an existing problem solving model known as the Pharmacists’ Patient Care Process (PPCP). I developed this research proposal over the course of the fall 2016 semester, while investigating literature relevant to naturalistic decision making, pharmacy practice environments, and the PPCP. This semester I am moving forward with initial data collection and analysis, employing an approach known as the Critical Decision Method (Crandall, Klein, & Hoffman, 2006), an interview protocol designed to elicit an expert's knowledge and reasoning through probing an actual incident that involved decision making in a naturalistic environment.
In addition to the work described above, I have been participating as part of a research team investigating the impact of technology-enhanced case-based activities implemented in a disease-state management course in the UGA College of Pharmacy. The roots of this project existed prior to my entry into the LDT program, but during the fall semester of 2016 I was involved in qualitative data analysis, regular research meetings, and wrote portions of the design and analysis sections of the manuscript for the project.
Instructional Design
As a full-time instructional designer at the College of Pharmacy, I collaborate closely with faculty on the design and development of learning environments for pharmacy students. During the fall semester of 2016 and spring semester of 2017, as part of a major curriculum overhaul, I have been involved in designing a series of case-based learning modules for several courses that focus on clinical decision making. Our team has adapted an instructional design model (Choi, Hong, Park, & Lee, 2013) for enhancing decision making skills that provides rich context through audio-visual resources and organizes learning around critical decisions in each case. I work closely with another instructional designer on the project, using a kind of designer-developer workflow in which I focus on aligning the instructional model to each case and structuring learner engagement, while she focuses on developing the media components. We work closely with the faculty instructors on the project throughout the process.
Evaluation is another area of instructional design work that I have recently focused on at the College of Pharmacy. In the fall, at the request of the faculty coordinator of one pharmacy course, I hosted a mid-semester focus group with students to better understand their learning experience. After transcribing the interview recording, I analyzed the data for overarching themes and developed a report to help the coordinator make informed decisions about her future course design.
I have also recently been involved in the planning, development, and implementation of a faculty development program at the College of Pharmacy known as FACT (Faculty Achievement in Course Transformation), which incentivizes instructional innovation by providing faculty with an opportunity to develop a proposal for an “in-house” grant from the college for the purpose of designing or redesigning a new course, lesson, or series of lessons. We partner with the Center for Teaching and Learning at UGA to deliver workshops around a relevant theme that may be of value to faculty as they develop the grant proposals.
Finally, in the 9990 Assessment of Real World Problem Solving seminar in the fall, I worked with Rita Rong and Supriya Mishra to suggest modifications to an existing assessment method known as the Script Concordance Test, which is used to measure medical students’ clinical reasoning skills. We believe that our modifications will link the instrument more closely with theoretical perspectives from the domain of cognitive psychology, and provide deeper insight into students’ clinical reasoning capabilities.
Conference Proposals
I submitted a proposal to present at AECT this fall on “Building a Foundation for the Design of Problem-Solving Learning Environments in Pharmacy Education Through the Study of Pharmacists’ Naturalistic Decision Making”. I hope to report on data that I will collect and analyze between now and the conference. I’ve also highlighted the methodological component of the study as a tool that may be of interest to many instructional designers.
Service
I met with prospective students to describe my research during the “LDT Ph.D Recruitment Weekend” on January 28th.
Future Goals
My broad goals for the program are to continue engaging in personally enriching learning experiences, develop additional professional skills, and serve learners through research and instructional design. In the short term, I’d like to conduct and publish the study detailed at the top of this page, with hopes that it will have practical implications in my work and the larger pharmacy education community. I’d also like to spend more time thinking critically about my own philosophical assumptions and how those assumptions should shape my research approaches.
References
Choi, I., Hong, Y.C., Park, H., & Lee, Y. (2013). Case-based learning for anesthesiology: Enhancing dynamic decision-making skills through cognitive apprenticeship and cognitive flexibility. In R. Luckin, S. Puntambekar, B. G. Goodyear, J. Underwood, & N. Winters (Eds.), Handbook of design in educational technology (pp. 230-240). New York: Routledge
Crandall, B., Klein, G. A., & Hoffman, R. R. (2006). Working minds : A practitioner's guide to cognitive task analysis: Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.