Acquisition of a Clinical Cancer Education Grant for Rush Medical College will allow us to develop further in six content areas: (1) Further development and formalization of a Cancer Education Committee, reporting directly to the Dean, charged with the broad responsibilities of initiation, implementation, and evaluation of new and existing cancer education programs at Rush Medical College; (2) A detailed audit of the second (pre-clinical) year medical curriculum to determine adequacy of basic science coverage pertinent to cancer-related topics; (3) Using the tracer method and faculty review, a detailed audit of the third and fourth (clinical) curricular years to determine the adequacy and completeness of clinical cancer teaching; (4) Further development, evaluations, and applications of a pre-test/post-test strategy to determine cognitive knowledge gain while developing and field testing a bank of reliable test items; (5) To develop case- or problem-solving workshops as a new teaching tool in the second (pre-clinical) years' curriculum; (6) To develop an instrument to measure attitudes toward physician behavior in the treatment of cancer patients and to relate any longitudinal changes of attitude to objectively determined cognitive knowledge changes.
