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Using a Topic Model to Map and Analyze a Large Curriculum

Takizawa, P.

2023-01-17 scientific communication and education
10.1101/2023.01.14.524073 bioRxiv
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A qualitative and quantitative understanding of curriculum content is critical for knowing whether its meeting its learning objectives. Curricula for medical education present challenges due to amount of content, the diversity of topics and the large number of contributing faculty. To create a manageable representation of the content in the pre-clerkship curriculum at Yale School of Medicine, a topic model was generated from all educational documents given to students during the pre-clerkship period. The model was used to quantitatively map content to school-wide competencies. The model measured how much of the curriculum addressed each topic and identified a new content area of interest, gender identity, whose coverage could be tracked over four years. The model also allowed quantitative measurement of integration of content within and between courses in the curriculum. The methods described here should be applicable to curricula in which texts can be extracted from materials.

Matching journals

The top 2 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.