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, and 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.
