What makes mentors thrive? An exploratory study of their satisfaction in undergraduate medical education.

BACKGROUND: Mentoring medical students with varied backgrounds and individual needs can be challenging. Mentors' satisfaction is likely to be important for the quality and sustainability of mentorships, especially in programs where the mentor has responsibility for facilitating a group of mentees. However, little is known about what influences mentors' satisfaction. The aim of this study was to measure mentors' self-reported satisfaction with the mentoring experience and to explore associations between satisfaction and its putative factors. METHODS: An online survey was sent out to all physician mentors in each of the three mentorship programs (UiT The Arctic University of Norway, the University of Bergen, and McGill University, graduation years 2013-2020, n = 461). Data were analyzed by descriptive statistics, dimension reduction, and linear regression. RESULTS: On a scale from 1 to 5, mean mentor satisfaction score at two Norwegian and one Canadian medical school was 4.55 (95% CI 4.47, 4.64). In a multilevel multivariate regression analysis, two predictors were significantly associated with mentors' satisfaction: (1) the perception that students found the group meetings valuable (ß = 0.186, 95% CI 0.021, 0.351, p = 0.027) and (2) mentors' perceived rewards (ß = 0.330, 95% CI 0.224, 0.437, p < 0.001). Perceived rewards included experiencing gratifying relationships with students, and mentors' perception of self-development. CONCLUSIONS: In this study, mentors appeared to be highly satisfied with their mentoring functions. Our findings suggest that mentors' overall satisfaction is closely linked to their experiences of fulfilling mentor-student relationships and personal and professional development. Interestingly, and perhaps contrary to commonly held assumptions, we found no association between mentor satisfaction and financial compensation. Furthermore, satisfaction was not associated with the provision of pre-assigned topics for discussions for mentor group meetings. We propose that the mentors' experienced psycho-social rewards, and their competence in establishing well-functioning group dynamics, should be areas of focus for faculty development.

Harnessing the potential of large language models in medical education: promise and pitfalls.

OBJECTIVES: To provide balanced consideration of the opportunities and challenges associated with integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) throughout the medical school continuum. PROCESS: Narrative review of published literature contextualized by current reports of LLM application in medical education. CONCLUSIONS: LLMs like OpenAI's ChatGPT can potentially revolutionize traditional teaching methodologies. LLMs offer several potential advantages to students, including direct access to vast information, facilitation of personalized learning experiences, and enhancement of clinical skills development. For faculty and instructors, LLMs can facilitate innovative approaches to teaching complex medical concepts and fostering student engagement. Notable challenges of LLMs integration include the risk of fostering academic misconduct, inadvertent overreliance on AI, potential dilution of critical thinking skills, concerns regarding the accuracy and reliability of LLM-generated content, and the possible implications on teaching staff.

High-precision measurement of the W boson mass with the CDF II detector.

The mass of the W boson, a mediator of the weak force between elementary particles, is tightly constrained by the symmetries of the standard model of particle physics. The Higgs boson was the last missing component of the model. After observation of the Higgs boson, a measurement of the W boson mass provides a stringent test of the model. We measure the W boson mass, MW, using data corresponding to 8.8 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity collected in proton-antiproton collisions at a 1.96 tera-electron volt center-of-mass energy with the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. A sample of approximately 4 million W boson candidates is used to obtain [Formula: see text], the precision of which exceeds that of all previous measurements combined (stat, statistical uncertainty; syst, systematic uncertainty; MeV, mega-electron volts; c, speed of light in a vacuum). This measurement is in significant tension with the standard model expectation.

Threshold concepts in group-based mentoring and implications for faculty development: A qualitative analysis.

INTRODUCTION: The literature on faculty development programs for mentors is scarce. This study examines mentors' experiences and challenges, with the aim of identifying threshold concepts in mentoring. It also discusses the implications for the faculty development of mentors. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews solicited personal narratives and reflections on mentors' lived experiences. Data analysis was guided by the threshold concepts framework allowing for the identification of significant and transformative shifts in perspectives. RESULTS: We interviewed 22 mentors from two Norwegian and one Canadian medical school with group-based mentoring programs. The mentoring experience involved four significant threshold concepts: focusing on students' needs; the importance of creating a trusting learning space; seeing oneself through the eyes of students; and aligning mentor and physician identities. CONCLUSION: Taking on a mentor role can provoke personal and professional dilemmas while also sparking growth. The trajectories of developing as a mentor and as a professional physician may be seen to mutually validate, mirror and reinforce each other. Faculty development programs designed specifically for mentors should aim to stimulate reflection on previous learning experiences and strive for a successful alignment of the distinct pedagogical and clinical content knowledge required to fulfill various professional roles.

Medical Wisdom.

Wise medical actions hinge on deliberative judgment. In the medical context, deliberation requires a grasp of a problem's relevant generalizations, its particulars, and their interactions. The process of generalization, rooted in the advancement and application of scientific knowledge and statistical methods, is well understood. But particularization, the process of teasing out relevant unique features of a case, is obscure, neglected, or even trivialized. Physicians must take the time necessary to identify, carefully disentangle, and weigh the various biological, interpersonal, contextual, technical, and ethical facets of a case. Not only are such details fundamental to making worthwhile and acceptably achievable medical decisions, but a practiced dealing with these details is a key feature of wisdom in medicine. This essay proposes a set of strategies to guide physicians in achieving a thorough understanding of individual cases and their constituent particulars, a proposal informed by extensive experiences in the clinic and classroom and by a review of the literature, and enriched by consultations with colleagues from multiple disciplines in medicine and the humanities.

Group mentorship for undergraduate medical students-a systematic review.

INTRODUCTION: Mentoring has become a prevalent educational strategy in medical education, with various aims. Published reviews of mentoring report very little on group-based mentorship programs. The aim of this systematic review was to identify group-based mentorship programs for undergraduate medical students and describe their aims, structures, contents and program evaluations. Based on the findings of this review, the authors provide recommendations for the organization and assessment of such programs. METHODS: A systematic review was conducted, according to PRISMA guidelines, and using the databases Ovid MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO and ERIC up to July 2019. Eight hundred abstracts were retrieved and 20 studies included. Quality assessment of the quantitative studies was done using the Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument (MERSQI). RESULTS: The 20 included studies describe 17 different group mentorship programs for undergraduate medical students in seven countries. The programs were differently structured and used a variety of methods to achieve aims related to professional development and evaluation approaches. Most of the studies used a single-group cross-sectional design conducted at a single institution. Despite the modest quality, the evaluation data are remarkably supportive of mentoring medical students in groups. DISCUSSION: Group mentoring holds great potential for undergraduate medical education. However, the scientific literature on this genre is sparse. The findings indicate that group mentorship programs benefit from being longitudinal and mandatory. Ideally, they should provide opportunities throughout undergraduate medical education for regular meetings where discussions and personal reflection occur in a supportive environment.

Clinical Teachers' Perceptions of Their Role in Professional Identity Formation.

PURPOSE: A fundamental goal of medical education is supporting learners in forming a professional identity. While it is known that learners perceive clinical teachers to be critically important in this process, the latter's perspective is unknown. This study sought to understand how clinical teachers perceive their influence on the professional identity formation of learners. METHOD: In 2017, a research assistant conducted 16 semistructured interviews of clinical teachers from 8 specialties at McGill University. The research assistant audiorecorded and subsequently transcribed interviews for analysis. Following principles of qualitative description, the research team developed a coding scheme using both inductive codes (from the words of the participants) and deductive codes (based on the literature and the theory of communities of practice). Through a cross-case analysis, the team then identified salient themes. RESULTS: Participants struggled to describe their influence on learners' professional identity without first being prompted to focus on their own identity and its formation. Once prompted, clinical teachers reported viewing their personal and professional identities as integrated and believed that caring for patients was integral to forming their professional identity. They identified explicit role modeling, engaging in difficult conversations, and providing graded autonomy as ways in which they could influence the identity development of learners. However, they had difficulty discerning the magnitude of their influence. CONCLUSIONS: This study was the first to explore professional identity formation from the perspective of clinical teachers. The 2010 Carnegie Foundation report called for an increased focus on professional identity formation. Giving clinical teachers the space and guidance to reflect on this process, helping them make the implicit explicit, and supporting them in using their own experiences as learners to inform their teaching appear to be critical steps in achieving this goal.

Stretching the Comfort Zone: Using Early Clinical Contact to Influence Professional Identity Formation in Medical Students.

PURPOSE: To explore first-year medical students' affective reactions to intimate encounters with severely sick patients in their homes, within a curricular innovation targeting the development of a patient-centered professional identity. BACKGROUND: Early patient encounters create complex emotional challenges and constitute fertile ground for professional identity formation. The literature indicates that students often learn, largely through the hidden curriculum, to avoid and suppress emotion. This can culminate in mental health problems and loss of empathy. METHOD: A qualitative descriptive analysis of 28 randomly selected, mandatory, reflective essays focused on a home visit to a previously unknown patient, in an unsupervised group of 4 students, within the context of a structured course called Patient Contact-PASKON. RESULTS: Students described a wide range of affect-laden responses, positive and negative, elicited by the home visits. The observations were typically related to loss of control, struggles to behave "professionally," and the unmasking of stereotypes and prejudices. CONCLUSIONS: Medical students' initial clinical encounters elicit emotional responses that have the potential to serve as triggers for the development of emotional maturity, relational skills, and patient-centered attitudes. Conversely, they can foreground uncertainty and lead to defensive distancing from patients' existential concerns. The findings point to a role for structured educational strategies and supervision to assist students in the emotion work necessary in the transition from a "lay" to a "medical" identity.

Reflection in medical education: intellectual humility, discovery, and know-how.

Reflection has been proclaimed as a means to help physicians deal with medicine's inherent complexity and remedy many of the shortcomings of medical education. Yet, there is little agreement on the nature of reflection nor on how it should be taught and practiced. Emerging neuroscientific concepts suggest that human thought processes are largely nonconscious, in part inaccessible to introspection. Our knowledge of the world is fraught with uncertainty, ignorance and indeterminacy, and influenced by emotion, biases and illusions, including the illusion of not having illusions. Neuroscience also documents that lifelong learning processes may hone nonconscious cognition to high levels of sophistication, allowing rapid and precise perceptions, judgments and actions in complex situations. We argue that knowledge of mechanisms underlying human thought may be useful in designing educational programs to foster desired attributes such as curiosity, critical self-awareness and intuitive acumen in medical professionals. The juxtaposition of neuroscientific insights with ideas from Kant on reflective judgement, van Manen on tact, and Aristotle on phronésis, supports a concept of reflection that manifests as wise practice. We suggest that reflection in medical education should be (a) an imperative for educators seeking to guide learners to manage the complexity and "messiness" of medical practice, and (b) a role-modelling mode of medical practice characterized by self-correcting behaviors that culminate in good and right professional actions. An example illustrates reflective practice in the teaching and learning of physicianship.

Search for the Exotic Meson X(5568) with the Collider Detector at Fermilab.

A search for the exotic meson X(5568) decaying into the B_{s}^{0}π^{±} final state is performed using data corresponding to 9.6 fb^{-1} from pp[over ¯] collisions at sqrt[s]=1960 GeV recorded by the Collider Detector at Fermilab. No evidence for this state is found and an upper limit of 6.7% at the 95% confidence level is set on the fraction of B_{s}^{0} produced through the X(5568)→B_{s}^{0}π^{±} process.

A study of reaching actions in walking infants.

Acquiring motor skills transforms the perceptual and cognitive world of infants and expands their exploratory engagement with objects. This study investigated how reaching is integrated with walking among infant walkers (n=23, 14.5-15.5 months). In a walk-to-reach paradigm, diverse object retrieval strategies were observed. All infants were willing to use their upper and lower bodies in concert, and the timing of this coordination reflected features of their environment. Infants with an older walking age (months since walking onset) retrieved items more rapidly and exploited their non-reaching hand more effectively during object retrieval than did same-age infants with a younger walking age. This suggests that the actions of the upper- and lower-body are flexibly integrated and that this integration may change across development. Mechanisms that shape sophisticated upper-body use during upright object retrieval are discussed. Infants flexibly integrate emerging motor skills in the service of object retrieval in ways not previously documented.

Search for Resonances Decaying to Top and Bottom Quarks with the CDF Experiment.

We report on a search for charged massive resonances decaying to top (t) and bottom (b) quarks in the full data set of proton-antiproton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of √[s]=1.96 TeV collected by the CDF II detector at the Tevatron, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 9.5 fb(-1). No significant excess above the standard model background prediction is observed. We set 95% Bayesian credibility mass-dependent upper limits on the heavy charged-particle production cross section times branching ratio to tb. Using a standard model extension with a W'→tb and left-right-symmetric couplings as a benchmark model, we constrain the W' mass and couplings in the 300-900 GeV/c(2) range. The limits presented here are the most stringent for a charged resonance with mass in the range 300-600 GeV/c(2) decaying to top and bottom quarks.

Constraints on models of the Higgs boson with exotic spin and parity using decays to bottom-antibottom quarks in the full CDF data set.

A search for particles with the same mass and couplings as those of the standard model Higgs boson but different spin and parity quantum numbers is presented. We test two specific alternative Higgs boson hypotheses: a pseudoscalar Higgs boson with spin-parity J^{P}=0^{-} and a gravitonlike Higgs boson with J^{P}=2^{+}, assuming for both a mass of 125 GeV/c^{2}. We search for these exotic states produced in association with a vector boson and decaying into a bottom-antibottom quark pair. The vector boson is reconstructed through its decay into an electron or muon pair, or an electron or muon and a neutrino, or it is inferred from an imbalance in total transverse momentum. We use expected kinematic differences between events containing exotic Higgs bosons and those containing standard model Higgs bosons. The data were collected by the CDF experiment at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider, operating at a center-of-mass energy of sqrt[s]=1.96 TeV, and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 9.45 fb^{-1}. We exclude deviations from the predictions of the standard model with a Higgs boson of mass 125 GeV/c^{2} at the level of 5 standard deviations, assuming signal strengths for exotic boson production equal to the prediction for the standard model Higgs boson, and set upper limits of approximately 30% relative to the standard model rate on the possible rate of production of each exotic state.

A schematic representation of the professional identity formation and socialization of medical students and residents: a guide for medical educators.

Recent calls to focus on identity formation in medicine propose that educators establish as a goal of medical education the support and guidance of students and residents as they develop their professional identity. Those entering medical school arrive with a personal identity formed since birth. As they proceed through the educational continuum, they successively develop the identity of a medical student, a resident, and a physician. Each individual's journey from layperson to skilled professional is unique and is affected by "who they are" at the beginning and "who they wish to become."Identity formation is a dynamic process achieved through socialization; it results in individuals joining the medical community of practice. Multiple factors within and outside of the educational system affect the formation of an individual's professional identity. Each learner reacts to different factors in her or his own fashion, with the anticipated outcome being the emergence of a professional identity. However, the inherent logic in the related processes of professional identity formation and socialization may be obscured by their complexity and the large number of factors involved.Drawing on the identity formation and socialization literature, as well as experience gained in teaching professionalism, the authors developed schematic representations of these processes. They adapted them to the medical context to guide educators as they initiate educational interventions, which aim to explicitly support professional identity formation and the ultimate goal of medical education-to ensure that medical students and residents come to "think, act, and feel like a physician."

The Humanities in Medical Education: Ways of Knowing, Doing and Being.

The personhood of the physician is a crucial element in accomplishing the goals of medicine. We review claims made on behalf of the humanities in guiding professional identity formation. We explore the dichotomy that has evolved, since the Renaissance, between the humanities and the natural sciences. The result of this evolution is an historic misconstrual, preoccupying educators and diverting them from the moral development of physicians. We propose a curricular framework based on the recovery of Aristotelian concepts that bridge identity and activity. The humanities and the natural sciences, jointly and severally, can fulfill developmental, characterological and instrumental purposes.

Measurements of direct CP-violating asymmetries in charmless decays of bottom baryons.

We report final measurements of direct CP-violating asymmetries in charmless decays of neutral bottom hadrons to pairs of charged hadrons with the upgraded Collider Detector at the Fermilab Tevatron. Using the complete √s=1.96 TeV proton-antiproton collisions data set, corresponding to 9.3 fb⁻¹ of integrated luminosity, we measure A(Λ(b)°â†’pπ⁻)=+0.06±0.07(stat)±0.03(syst) and A(Λ(b)°â†’pK⁻)=-0.10±0.08(stat)±0.04(syst), compatible with no asymmetry. In addition we measure the CP-violating asymmetries in B(s)°â†’K⁻π⁺ and B°â†’K⁺π⁻ decays to be A(B(s)°â†’K⁻π⁺)=+0.22±0.07(stat)±0.02(syst) and A(B°â†’K⁺π⁻)=-0.083±0.013(stat)±0.004(syst), respectively, which are significantly different from zero and consistent with current world averages.

Measurement of the inclusive leptonic asymmetry in top-quark pairs that decay to two charged leptons at CDF.

We measure the inclusive forward-backward asymmetry of the charged-lepton pseudorapidities from top-quark pairs produced in proton-antiproton collisions and decaying to final states that contain two charged leptons (electrons or muons). The data are collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 9.1 fb(-1). We measure the leptonic forward-backward asymmetry, A(FB)(ℓ), to be 0.072 ± 0.060 and the leptonic pair forward-backward asymmetry, A(FB)(ℓℓ), to be 0.076 ± 0.082. The measured values can be compared with the standard model predictions of A(FB)(ℓ) = 0.038 ± 0.003 and A(FB)(ℓℓ) = 0.048 ± 0.004, respectively. Additionally, we combine the A(FB)(ℓ) result with a previous determination from a final state with a single lepton and hadronic jets and obtain A(FB)(ℓ) = 0.090(-0.026)(+0.028).

Reframing medical education to support professional identity formation.

Teaching medical professionalism is a fundamental component of medical education. The objective is to ensure that students understand the nature of professionalism and its obligations and internalize the value system of the medical profession. The recent emergence of interest in the medical literature on professional identity formation gives reason to reexamine this objective. The unstated aim of teaching professionalism has been to ensure the development of practitioners who possess a professional identity. The teaching of medical professionalism therefore represents a means to an end.The principles of identity formation that have been articulated in educational psychology and other fields have recently been used to examine the process through which physicians acquire their professional identities. Socialization-with its complex networks of social interaction, role models and mentors, experiential learning, and explicit and tacit knowledge acquisition-influences each learner, causing them to gradually "think, act, and feel like a physician."The authors propose that a principal goal of medical education be the development of a professional identity and that educational strategies be developed to support this new objective. The explicit teaching of professionalism and emphasis on professional behaviors will remain important. However, expanding knowledge of identity formation in medicine and of socialization in the medical environment should lend greater logic and clarity to the educational activities devoted to ensuring that the medical practitioners of the future will possess and demonstrate the qualities of the "good physician."