Using Curriculum Mapping to Evaluate Physiology Core Competency Coverage in an Integrated Medical School Curriculum
Authors: Rieg Jessica Dominguez , Bizri Siwar , Connolly Tara , Vazquez Ivan , Puckett Shane , DeWaay Deborah 
Published: April 2020

Curriculum mapping is the process of indexing or diagramming a curriculum for purposes of improving the overall coherence and effectiveness of a course of study. A well‐designed curriculum map should ensure appropriate coverage of content, align teaching and learning with curriculum goals, improve integration across the curriculum, and facilitate demonstration of outcomes to stakeholders and accrediting agencies. The University of South Florida developed a novel electronic curriculum management database through process workflows that allows us to map entrustable professional activities, program objectives, course objectives, session objectives, keywords, hours per session, and assessments across our integrated medical school curriculum. In addition, we mapped national discipline‐specific core competencies to each session. The overall goal was to determine how well and to what extent we are matching content that students are actually taught with the academic expectations described in the learning objectives. The aims of mapping at this granular level were to: 1) identify gaps and redundancies; 2) evaluate horizontal and vertical integration of content; and 3) identify how much content is covered vs national core competencies. Once all course data for academic year 2017–2018 was entered by course/clerkship directors into the database, 11 integration directors specializing in 16 disciplines reviewed the session objectives for 942 sessions within 20 required courses in parallel with reviewing posted PowerPoint slides or other teaching material. Each session was tagged with national core competencies ("content objectives") for each discipline. For physiology, we based national core competencies on the Medical Physiology Learning Objectives developed by the American Physiological Society/Association of Chairs of Departments of Physiology. A total of 1002 physiology content objectives were entered into the database, of which 754 (75%) were mapped to sessions and 248 (25%) were unmapped (i.e. not covered in the curriculum). Of the mapped content objectives, physiology competencies were addressed in 274 sessions (30%) within 15 courses (75%). As expected, physiology competencies were covered predominantly in pre‐clerkship basic medical science courses and doctoring. However, physiology competencies were also identified in all 5 clerkships (adult medicine, psychiatry/neurology, surgical care, primary care, and maternal‐newborn pediatrics). These analytics allowed us to demonstrate that even though physiology competencies may not be part of course or session objectives per se, faculty are teaching and reviewing physiology concepts across the entire curriculum. For the 248 unmapped content objectives, the next step will be to evaluate why they are not being taught (e.g. why are only 7 of the 17 core competencies in integration & exercise physiology mapped?). In conclusion, incorporating discipline‐specific competencies into the curriculum map is a useful tool to identify gaps and redundancies and evaluate integration of content. It also fostered communication between faculty, course/clerkship directors and administrators to really think about what is being taught and how to improve our curriculum.