Evidence Based Education

Our spiral curricular approach builds on two distinct pillars of evidence based education: backwards design and integration.

A “backwards design” curricular approach asserts that behavioral objectives are first established, which then “serve as a driving force that controls the pedagogical and evaluative efforts that follow” (Cho & Trent, 2005).

The EPAs of the CBVE provide us with those behavioral objectives in terms of summative assessment goals (i.e. essential tasks graduating students must be able to perform as early career vets) to be measured during the 4th year clinical experience.  This provides direct goals for a backwards design approach to building out the curriculum.  While the EPAs give us an official endpoint at which we want students to arrive, nested EPAs spread across the pre-clinical program provide expectations for where students should be at the end of each curricular year.  Where EPAs are used for clinical practice only, nested EPAs reflect desired outcomes of a clinical experience in a pre-clinical setting.  This stretching of learning targets across all four years of the CVM program allows pre-clinical instructors to directly align course level objectives, activities, and assessments to overall program goals for students.

Integration, on the other hand, “is best described in medical education as ‘the organization of teaching matter to interrelate or unify subjects frequently taught in separate academic courses or departments’” (Hussain et al., 2020). Our large footprint Thread design affords planners the flexibility they need to align content across systems and species for meaningful comparative learning.