METRICS: a pattern language for education scholarship
By David Topps
Scholarly activities in health professions education have been growing but despite the interest, what is considered as scholarship in (medical) education has remained vague. Boyer’s classes of scholarly activity (Boyer 1990) and Glassick’s criteria required of an artefact to render it scholarly (Glassick et al. 1997) have been widely discussed. While the Glassick model helps to define what scholarly activity should be, we have found the Boyer model of what kinds of activity count as scholarship is lacking. We developed the METRICS pattern language of scholarship in (medical) education - this 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, we now seek to engage others in its implementation.
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