Applying a reflexive framework to evaluate a communication skills curriculum

After creating and delivering an educational curriculum, medical educators must ultimately evaluate the effectiveness of the implemented curriculum. Seasoned educators can benefit from using an established framework to help them structure a thorough, complete curricular evaluation; however, novice educators may have difficulty in transforming the concept of evaluation into a concrete process. The RUFDATA (Reasons and purpose, Uses, Focus, Data and evidence, Audience, Timing, and Agency) framework is one such paradigm. It is a well-recognized tool consisting of a reflexive framework that can guide medical educators to evaluate their own medical education curriculum. Just as important, it enables medical educators to reflect on the reasons behind the evaluation. This insight, in turn, can foster a spirit of evaluation, thus helping to ingrain it into the local educational culture. By using the evaluation of our communication skills curriculum as an example, this article describes how educators can apply the RUFDATA framework to evaluate their own curriculum.