Problems of comprehension of medical education vocabulary

Medical teachers' understanding of the vocabulary of medical education has been studied by asking a group of medical teachers whether they understood twenty-two commonly used and important medical educational terms, and whether they could distinguish between the terms. All the words presented some problem of comprehension and the majority of respondents found difficulty with approximately one-third of the terms. This poor comprehension of the vocabulary of medical education is a problem in the communication process necessary to the practice of medical teaching and the encouragement of learning. Authors of medical education reports and articles should be aware of the difficulties in comprehension. The provision of a dictionary of medical education terms would be useful as a reference source and as a reservoir of definitions to be included in published reports and articles.