Using a topic model to map and analyze a large curriculum

A qualitative and quantitative understanding of curriculum content is critical for knowing whether it’s meeting its learning objectives. Curricula for medical education present challenges due to amount of content, the diversity of topics and the large number of contributing faculty. To create a manageable representation of the content in the pre-clerkship curriculum at Yale School of Medicine, a topic model was generated from all educational documents given to students during the pre-clerkship period. The model was used to quantitatively map content to school-wide competencies. The model measured how much of the curriculum addressed each topic and identified a new content area of interest, gender identity, whose coverage could be tracked over four years. The model also allowed quantitative measurement of integration of content within and between courses in the curriculum. The methods described here should be applicable to curricula in which texts can be extracted from materials.