About CERA
CERA, the CAFM Educational Research Alliance, is a framework to focus and support medical education research. CERA conducts approximately five surveys per year of:
- Family medicine residency directors (surveyed twice per year)
- Clerkship directors
- Department chairs
- General membership, including subsets of members as selected by applicants
- Family medicine residents
- Medical students
CERA Vision
Excellent family medicine educational research
CERA Mission
Provide a centralized infrastructure to:
- Produce rigorous and generalizable medical education research
- Facilitate collaboration among medical education researchers
- Provide training and mentorship in educational research methods
- Ensure that the work of CERA reflects and supports efforts to address equity, diversity, and antiracism
How CERA Works
- Investigators respond to calls for proposals to submit questions for surveys
- Each CERA survey includes questions submitted by investigators, as well as a set of recurring demographic and organizational questions to provide data for historical comparisons
- Once proposals have been approved, experienced researchers/mentors join each project team to help refine questions, facilitate analysis, and prepare and submit manuscripts.
- Researchers receive their individual survey results, plus the recurring question responses. Researchers are given 3 months to analyze the data from the survey prior to release of the data to the general membership. The expectation is that investigators will write and submit a paper within those 3 months.
- Members of STFM, NAPCRG, AFMRD, and ADFM use CERA data for secondary analysis.
Survey Schedule
233
Completed Presentations
CERA studies have resulted in 233 scholarly presentations. See the full list.
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Wow! What a job to all. Thank you so very much for letting me be a part of this. I have learned so much from the process and I am just amazed at the strengths of all involved from the amazing writing, thoughts, statistical resources, video conferences… I am really excited at our findings and hope it generates lots of thoughtful consideration. Thank you again so much. Maybe I will get to meet you all someday :).
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We used the tenure question from all 11 program director surveys to look at the mean and median for 2011-2017. We are so grateful for this data and the CERA survey and the sharing. This is a priority topic for AFMRD and the data was so helpful.
Steven Brown, MD
University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix Family Medicine Residency
Questions?
If you have questions about CERA, contact Sam Grammer
