METRICS: a pattern language of scholarship in medical education

Scholarly activity in health professions education has been growing steadily but despite the broad interest, quite what is considered to be scholarly activity in medical education has remained vague. Boyer’s classes of scholarly activity (Boyer 1990) and Glassick et al.’s criteria required of an artefact to render it scholarly (Glassick et al. 1997) have been widely discussed. While the Glassick model has helped to define to what scholarly activity should be, we have found the Boyer model of what kinds of activity count as scholarship is lacking. We have developed the METRICS model of scholarly activity in medical education that maps more directly to scholarly activities. Metascholarship - activities that reflect on the nature of scholarship; Evaluation - activities that measure value or axiology; Translation - activities that move findings or practices from one domain to another; Research - activities that focus on theory generation or testing (experimental, descriptive or explanatory); Innovation - activities that focus on creating new ideas, objects and practices; Conceptual - activities that explore or develop new models, concepts, and paradigms; Synthesis - activities that focus on the integration of existing knowledge and practice. Having built the METRICS model and tested it extensively in our own practice, we now seek to engage others in its use and appraisal.