Are your curriculum and assessment maps ready for July 1?

Why is a curriculum map important?

1. Indicates the relationships between various components of your residency program’s curriculum.
2. Helps plan learning activities along CBD stages.
3. Links the competencies to be mastered (EPAs) to the educational strategies (clinical rotations, teaching rounds, AHD, curricula, RTE’s) and assessment tools (forms 1–4).
4. Aligns EPAs with the distribution of training activities.
5. Ensures that all mandatory components for accreditation are included in your program curriculum.

Other Key Benefits

1. Helps program directors determine which EPAs are best assessed during which clinical rotations.
2. Helps program directors and residents organize all key aspects of CBD in one document.
3. Helps program directors plan rotations to make sure EPAs can be assessed during the most appropriate stage of training.
4. Helps residents know when their important CBD meetings, exams, curricula, etc. are during the year.
5. Helps program directors and residents know which EPAs will be covered in which year of training.

Curriculum mapping should start sooner than you might think!

Programs are encouraged to start curriculum mapping as soon as a discipline has a relatively stable set of EPAs, often nearing the end of their second CBD workshop.  Your curriculum map doesn’t have to be perfect from the start, as it will evolve over time.

Royal College: Ten steps for successful curriculum mapping

1. Assemble a dynamic team.
2. Review / develop your program’s mission and / or goals.
3. Create a diagram, map, or spreadsheet to visualize the existing curriculum in one place.
4. Review existing training experiences.
5. Place EPAs in context and map them to existing training experiences.
6. Validate the distribution of EPAs (and assessment tools) across the stages of the program.
7. Ensure a logical progression of learning.
8. Include formal observation/feedback opportunities.
9. Ensure the program complies with accreditation standards.
10. Evaluate the program regularly with the goal of continuous improvement.

What is Assessment Mapping?

• A way to ensure that the types of assessment you have chosen are assessing the learning outcomes of your program.
• Provides a visual depiction of the spread or patterns to ensure a balance of formative and summative assessment, deadlines and feedback returns.
• Aligning timing of compiled assessments to be available before Coach and Competence Committee meetings.
• Ensure balance such that
  • assessments are not based on too many of the same learning outcomes.
  • all learning outcomes are being assessed.

Mac-CBME Workshops

The CBME office at McMaster offers an annual Curriculum Mapping workshop for program directors and/or CBD leads, as well as Program Administrators. The workshop provides a step-by-step outline of how to develop your curriculum map and provides several mapping templates that programs may choose to use. As of 2021, we also have an Assessment Mapping workshop where participants learn to map their programs’ EPAs to key learning experiences across their curriculum.

See below resources from previously held workshops.

 A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO CURRICULUM MAPPING – SEPTEMBER 2020