Learning Outcomes and Their Relatedness Under Curriculum Drift

Mondal, Sneha; Dhamecha, Tejas I.; Pathak, Smriti; Mendoza, Red; Wijayarathna, Gayathri K.; Gagnon, Paul; Carlstedt-Duke, Jan

A typical medical curriculum is organized as a hierarchy of learning outcomes (LOs), each LO is a short text that describes a medical concept. Machine learning models have been applied to predict relatedness between LOs. These models are trained on examples of LO-relationships annotated by experts. However, medical curricula are periodically reviewed and revised, resulting in changes to the structure and content of LOs. This work addresses the problem of model adaptation under curriculum drift. First, we propose heuristics to generate reliable annotations for the revised curriculum, thus eliminating dependence on expert annotations. Second, starting with a model pre-trained on the old curriculum, we inject a task-specific transformation layer to capture nuances of the revised curriculum. Our approach makes significant progress towards reaching human-level performance.