Critical Data Literacy: Addressing race as a variable in a preclinical medical education session: Background

"The Formative Observed Simulated Clinical Experience (FOSCE) sessions, which are led by CSR instructors, serve as an opportunity to work in simulated environment, allowing students to integrate practice of history‐taking, physical exam, and clinical reasoning skills in a series of standardized patient cases. Students will use information obtained from standardized patients’ history and physical exams to create differential diagnoses and order appropriate diagnostic testing, ultimately leading to the correct diagnosis."

"With advances in information technology, informatics has become an important clinical skill. Library faculty work with small groups of students to teach skills in finding high‐quality medical information and assist them in critically evaluating sources."

Clinical Skills and Professional Development | The School of Medicine & Health Sciences (gwu.edu)

Librarians are an integral part of evidence-based medicine (EBM) education, collaborating with faculty on curriculum development, instruction, assessment, and more. Dorsch and Perry[1] found that librarian involvement in EBM instruction had positive effects on information retrieval, clinical decision making, and critical appraisal. As librarians have been key to teaching EBM and information literacy, there is a clear capacity to integrate critical data literacy into librarian-led instruction. There are a number of skills librarians already possess that can be applied to data science, and librarians are uniquely capable of learning the additional skills necessary to translate data science knowledge to data science instruction. Critical data literacy shares similar competencies with critical information literacy[2]. Once librarians have a foundational knowledge of data literacy, incorporating critical data literacy into EBM education as Himmelfarb librarians did becomes a vital educational source for preclinical medical students.

1. Dorsch JL, Perry GJ. Evidence-based medicine at the intersection of research interests between academic health sciences librarians and medical educators: a review of the literature. Journal of the Medical Library Association. 2012;100(4):251-257. doi:10.3163/1536-5050.100.4.006. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484942/
2. Federer L, Foster ED, Glusker A, Henderson M, Read K, Zhao S. The Medical Library Association Data Services Competency: a framework for data science and open science skills development. Journal of the Medical Library Association. 2020;108(2):304-309. doi:10.5195/jmla.2020.909. Available from: http://jmla.mlanet.org/ojs/jmla/article/view/909

The Pooled Cohort Equation

The Pooled Cohort Equation, which replaced the Framingham Cardiovascular Risk Assessment, included data from several studies, including Non-Hispanic White and African-Americans men and women​ age 40-79.