Education Research
The SickKids Learning Institute is committed to advancing Education Research in the hospital and building a community of practice towards achieving this goal. The Education Research program is focused on exploring and fostering excellence in health professional education through collaborative, interdisciplinary programs of research. Using methodologies and theories from disciplines including education, psychology and the humanities, we are working to ensure that learning is the link between research, practice and improved patient care.
Dr. Lorelei Lingard, PhD, was the first education researcher at the learning Institute. She was a Senior Scientist with SickKids Research Institute and is an internationally renowned researcher in team communication and collaboration. Through the study of how existing teams function in health-care settings, Dr. Lingard’s research aims to build knowledge of collaborative team practices that improve the delivery of patient care. For example the Partnered Learning Project, funded by the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s HealthForceOntario initiative, developed, implemented and evaluated a curriculum in three institutions, to promote team-based collaboration on exiting healthcare teams and to partner these teams with interprofessional learners for innovative clinical placements. Dr Lingard has taken on a new role as Founding Director of a new Centre for Education Research and Innovation in the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario.
Dr. Maria Mylopoulos, PhD, is a cognitive scientist whose research focuses on understanding the practice and development of expertise in health care. Her research program explores how healthcare professionals solve problems, improve their practice and learn during their everyday activities. The goal of her research program is to evolve our understanding of the cognitive and meta-cognitive processes that underpin these processes as they occur in real-world contexts, using theoretical frameworks of adaptive expertise, knowledge building and distributed cognition. Her work is aimed at ensuring optimal patient care through the fostering of sustained innovation in health-care practice. Dr. Mylopoulos is appointed as a Scientist the SickKids Research Institute and Assistant Professor in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Adam Dubrowski’s research career has focused on studying how simulation techniques and learning-enabled technologies can accelerate the acquisition of knowledge, skills and attitudes in health care professionals. He commenced by studying factors influencing the acquisition of technical skills for surgery and particularly methods of optimizing simulation-based practice, factors influencing retention, maintenance and transfer of skills and the validation of innovative assessment methods to measure these effects. More recently his interests have evolved to study the acquisition of complex clinical skills, behaviours and attitudes by contextualizing the simulated experiences.
Our education research team is embedded in the Learning Institute and collaborates with members from across the hospital community as well as local, national and international education researchers. The program encompasses projects at SickKids and beyond.