WHEA Fellowship in Educational Scholarship

• Formulating research questions
• Searching and evaluating the education literature
• Study design
• Learner assessment
• Quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis
• Questionnaire design and survey research
• Program evaluation
• Scholarly writing

A complete application includes:

• A completed online application form
• The applicant’s current Curriculum vitae
• A personal statement that addresses the following:
  • Your current education role in your school, department, program or unit
  • Your goals and expectations for the fellowship
  • Your current or past experiences with educational scholarship, if any, and any information that demonstrates your ability to complete a longitudinal project
  • The type of project you would like to pursue – this does not need to be a fully formed project, rather an idea of an area of interest and/or a question you would like to consider. Please include information about the feasibility of conducting a study in your area of interest.
• Letter of support from the applicant’s Dean, Chair, Division Chief, or direct supervisor addressing the applicant’s ability to be successful in developing, implementing, and disseminating a scholarly education project. The writer must also agree to support the applicant by allowing adequate time to meet the fellowship obligations. Please obtain your letter of support and submit it with your online application.

Address questions to WHEA@emory.edu

The fellowship is open to any member of the Emory Health Sciences community who has an educational role. This would include, but is not limited to, teaching learners (e.g., trainees, patients, colleagues, or instructors/faculty), supervising learners at any level, running any size educational unit, facilitating learning experiences, or advising and mentoring learners. Participants can be educators from the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Rollins School of Public Health, School of Medicine (including Health Professions programs), Winship Cancer Institute, Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Laney Graduate School (if their learners are in the health sciences), or educators in the Emory Healthcare system. All Emory Healthcare sites and affiliated institutions such as the VA, CHOA, and Grady are included.

Participants must commit to attending all nine workshops and project mentoring meetings held once monthly from September 2024 – May 2025 on Wednesdays from 1-5pm: September 18, October 16, November 20, December 11, January 15, 2025, February 19, March 19, April 16, and May 21. Sessions will be a mix of in-person and virtual meetings; in-person sessions will be held on the Clifton Road campus. Applicants who know in advance that they will miss one or more sessions should note this in their personal statement on the online application.

The project idea does not have to be fully developed in the application. A few sentences about who you teach/supervise/mentor and what you either would like to evaluate about what you currently do or what you want to change/develop and study, will suffice. Knowing the applicant’s ideas will help us frame the kick-off event and assign mentors. Having an idea to start with will help fellows get the most out of the sessions. We expect project ideas to be fully developed by the end of the nine workshops, with an IRB proposal ready to submit by that time if necessary. We expect that some participants will change projects after the fellowship begins as they think through their original ideas.

All projects start with something (e.g., teaching, assessment, curriculum, supervision, mentoring) in the investigator’s educational environment that the investigator wants to study. Choose something important to you. There is a wide range of project types, from doing a systematic or scoping review on an important educational topic (e.g., what are key features of faculty development initiatives designed to promote educational research skills development & educational scholarship in medical education?), needs assessments (e.g., how do health professions students at Emory view their current interprofessional education opportunities?), retrospective data analyses (e.g., have residents incorporated new practice guidelines into their care of continuity clinic patients over the past 2 years?), validation studies (e.g., establishing the reliability and validity of a new tool to assess medical student oral case presentations), educational intervention studies (e.g., does instituting a day long workshop on communication skills improve medical students’ ability to counsel patients on lifestyle changes?), and others.

For examples of the types of projects that previous fellows have done, please see the posters of the 2022 graduates in PDF format under each of their names at https://whsc.emory.edu/education/whea/fellows/21-22-education.html.

Yes, if two or more people want to do a project together and apply as a group, each group member should complete an application but note the group project and members in the description of project section.

Educational scholarship would include any investigations or opinion pieces that were prompted by a local or national need, were informed by what is already known about the issue of interest and were disseminated locally or nationally via publication or presentation.

Yes, participants can be awarded up to 4 CME or CNE credits for each of the monthly workshops.

This would include any teaching, mentoring, advising, curriculum development, program oversight or administration or other activities related to education in your field.