Abstract
ABSTRACT Background: Residents are expected to develop the skills to set learning goals. Setting learning goals is part of self-regulated learning, setting the foundation for creating a learning plan, deploying learning strategies, and assessing their progress to those goals. While effective goal setting is essential to resident self-regulated learning, residents struggle with setting learning goals and desire faculty assistance with goal setting. Objective: We aimed to characterize the topics and quality of residents’ rotation-specific learning goals. Design: We conducted a prospective study of 153 internal medicine residents, assessing 455 learning goals for general medicine inpatient rotations. We coded learning goal themes, competencies, and learning domains, and assessed quality using the validated Learning Goal Scoring Rubric. We compared topic categories, competencies, learning domains, and quality between the first and second months of postgraduate (PGY)-1 residents and between PGY-1 and PGY-3 residents. We assessed factors associated with learning goal completion. Results: The overall response rate was 80%. The top three learning goal categories were patient management, specific diseases related to general medicine, and teaching skills. There were no changes in learning goal characteristics between PGY-1 months (p ≥ 0.04). There were differences between PGY-1 and PGY-3 residents’ learning goals in patient management (28% vs 6%; p < .001), specific disease conditions (19% vs 3%; p < .001), and teaching skills (2% vs 56%; p < .001). There was no difference in learning goal quality between PGY-1 months (1.63 vs. 1.67; p = 0.82). The PGY-3 learning goals were of higher quality than PGY-1 learning goals for the ‘specific goal’ item (1.38 vs. 0.98, p = 0.005), but not for other items or overall (all p ≥ 0.02). Residents reported 85% (297/347) learning goal completion. Conclusions: Resident rotation-specific learning goals reflect a broad array of topics. Residents’ learning goal quality was low and residents may benefit from guidance to support residents’ learning goals.
Highlights
The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Core Program Requirements highlight the importance of setting learning goals during residency training: ‘Residents must demonstrate competence in ... setting learning and improvement goals’ [1]
While effective goal setting is essential to resident self-regulated learning, setting learning goals in clinical practice can be challenging
While we demonstrated a high rate of learning goal completion, there was no association between goal completion and the characteristics or quality of the goal
Summary
The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Core Program Requirements highlight the importance of setting learning goals during residency training: ‘Residents must demonstrate competence in ... setting learning and improvement goals’ [1]. Setting learning goals is an essential step in self-regulated learning, which Zimmerman defined as ‘self-generated thoughts, feelings and actions to attain learning goals’ and has several features, including 1) the purposive use of specific processes, strategies, or responses to improve academic achievement; 2) a self-oriented feedback loop during learning to monitor the effectiveness of the learning process, strategy, or response; and 3) a motivational dimension describing how and why a particular process, strategy, or response was chosen [2]. While effective goal setting is essential to resident self-regulated learning, setting learning goals in clinical practice can be challenging. Setting learning goals is part of self-regulated learning, setting the foundation for creating a learning plan, deploying learning strategies, and assessing their progress to those goals. Objective: We aimed to characterize the topics and quality of residents’ rotation-specific learning goals
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