43 A beliefs framework 2 medical schools and had had their curricula redesigned in the decade prior to the interviews, adopting a more learning-centred approach. Learning-centred curricula have gained popularity worldwide in recent decades and are most common today in medical education. Procedure All interviews were conducted by the first author. We used the interview guide of Samuelowicz and Bain with open-ended questions concerning teaching, learning, and knowledge14 as a basis for the interview (see interview guide in Addendum 2.2). Where relevant, we explicitly asked participants to reflect on their small group teaching (classroom instruction within a structured module). Because some literature concludes that educational beliefs can be influenced by class size,22 we wanted to avoid participants answering the questions with exclusively large group lectures in mind. We expected the small group setting to give the most insightful information about participants’ educational beliefs. To ensure that our findings would also be generalizable to other teaching formats, we added questions about whether the participants believed that the teaching format (small group versus large group versus one-on-one teaching) influenced their teaching or the students’ learning. In this way we aimed to gain insight into the beliefs applicable to these educational settings. We also requested that participants focus on their preclinical teaching to rule out differences in course level as an influencing contextual factor, since beliefs may vary according to the level of teaching.13,22 Because we aimed to develop a comprehensive holistic image of the beliefs of the faculty participants, we asked them to illustrate their perspectives with examples from their teaching sessions and focused further exploration on the examples that were provided. The interviews of one-hour duration on average were audio-taped and transcribed verbatim. We tested both the interview protocol and the survey questions in a pilot study with three participants who did not contribute to the main study. One of these participants was bilingual. Using their comments, we improved the interview questions and were able to address potential language issues. Ethics approval and consent to participate This study was granted an ethics waiver by the Medical School Ethics Committee of the LUMC (reference C15.033/SH/sh). According to the same committee, formal written informed consent was not required. Similarly, the study was deemed as ‘not involving human subjects research’ by the Stanford University Human Subjects Committee and was exempt from human subjects oversight. The first author invited all the participants by e-mail or telephone, emphasising that participation was voluntary and anonymous. All participants gave oral consent.
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