CPD Still Counts Activities Instead of Curiosity and Reflection

Key Takeaways

• Scholarly practice is being framed as a measurable CPD outcome: curiosity, critical appraisal, reflection, evidence use, and professional identity.
• The respiratory-therapy example is specialty-specific, but the measurement method is portable across professions if validated with local learners.
• For CME providers, the opportunity is to test short reflection instruments that show change over time, not only activity completion.

Respiratory-therapy educators are developing validated scales to measure scholarly practice—curiosity, critical appraisal, and reflection—as trackable CPD outcomes instead of relying on activity counts or publication tallies. The evidence comes from a single journal-affiliated podcast episode, so the signal is emerging; the methods, however, are directly relevant to CME teams trying to move beyond participation counts.

Measure the habit, not the artifact

In a JCEHP Emerging Best Practices in CPD episode, the discussion starts with respiratory therapy but quickly becomes a CPD measurement problem. Scholarly practice is not treated as publishing papers. It is framed as curiosity, critical thinking, deliberate engagement with knowledge, reflection, evidence use, and the behaviors that help clinicians keep improving.

That matters because many CME outcomes models still make the easiest things most visible: registrations, completions, satisfaction, confidence, maybe intent to change. Those are useful, but they do not tell a provider whether a learner is becoming more reflective, more capable of appraising evidence, or more likely to use knowledge in daily practice.

The useful part of the episode is methodological. The authors describe a structured scale-development process: define the construct, review the literature, interview practitioners, generate items in the language of the field, test with experts and users, pilot, and use exploratory factor analysis to reduce redundancy. The goal was not a long survey. It was a usable instrument that could capture dimensions of scholarly practice without asking the same question 50 ways.

For CME providers, the lesson is not to copy a respiratory-therapy tool wholesale. It is to stop treating reflection as a free-text box added after the real activity. A short, tested reflection scale could help longitudinal programs track whether learners are strengthening appraisal habits, seeking evidence, identifying support needs, and connecting learning to practice decisions. We saw a related concern in a March brief on clinicians asking for better appraisal training; this week’s signal adds the measurement layer.

The caveat is important: this tool still needs independent validation before broad adoption, and its development sample and professional context matter. But CME teams do not need to wait for a universal instrument to improve their own measurement discipline. The immediate question is whether a program’s stated outcomes include behaviors like reflection and evidence use—and whether the evaluation plan has any credible way to observe them over time.

What CME Providers Should Test

• Pilot a five- to eight-item scholarly-practice reflection scale in one longitudinal series, then compare completion and usefulness against standard post-activity evaluation items.
• Map current needs assessments against scholar-role language in CANMEDS, ACGME, or relevant professional frameworks to identify where reflection and evidence-use behaviors are assumed but not measured.
• Use learner responses to distinguish individual learning needs from organizational barriers, such as lack of time, mentorship, or access to evidence resources.

The stronger move

The strongest CME outcome is not always a new clinical answer. Sometimes it is a better professional habit: pausing, questioning, checking evidence, asking for support, and applying what is learned with more discipline. If CME providers want credit for building those habits, they need instruments that make them visible before, during, and after the activity.