With the holiday spirit in mind, we wanted to let everyone know of a large update to Firecracker’s Faculty Dashboard, allowing you and the rest of your school’s Faculty to get a much more accurate and in depth look at how your students are tracking in terms of their board preparedness.

We've built a highly-attributed database of high-quality content that is served up to students at massive scale. Part of managing a platform of this size, with tens of thousands of questions answered over 300M times, is deeply understanding not just our subject matter focus but also our ability to assess depth of knowledge and cognitive complexity. 

Firecracker is committed to working with our institutional partners to ensure their submission of the Curriculum Inventory (CI) meets the AAMC guidelines and business rules for the inventory structure and competency framework. Our focus is to accurately represent curricular data and student activity on our platform using the appropriate curriculum structure rules and standardized vocabulary.

Academic Medicine, the journal of the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) published an article titled "Study Behaviors and USMLE Step 1 Performance: Implications of a Student Self-Directed Parallel Curriculum", which you can read online on the Academic Medicine website or download a copy here.

One of Firecracker’s main goals in partnering with an institution is to support faculty in two areas:

1) Guiding student self-study

2) Generating integrated assessments of, and for learning

Firecracker’s content experts and our Academic Operations team work with faculty to align Firecracker's topics and questions to Faculty learning objectives. The result is a course companion comprised of supportive topic summaries, review questions (e.g. flashcards, simple MCQs), and board-style practice questions. Questions can then be packaged into quizzes and tests depending on what, how, and when faculty and administrators want to assess their students.

Firecracker will be in Chicago attending AMA 2017 and here's how you can find us:

1. Swing by booth 15 in the networking lounge

2. Stop by our space at kiosk 7 in the foyer

3. Say hello at our happy hour at the Boleo Rooftop Bar in the Kimpton Gray Hotel at 6pm on Friday

Firecracker is helping to drive change in medical education by empowering students to engage in self-directed study, enabling faculty to curate a student's curricular experience on our platform, supporting administrator's programmatic analysis and reporting needs, and providing everyone with data-driven high-quality assessments across a wide spectrum of formative and summative testing needs.

Sue Shellenbarger published an article today in The Wall Street Journal that touched on many of Firecracker's core values as a learning platform. Here are a few highights:

Firecracker's evolution from student study aid to programmatic assessment system for health science schools.

Firecracker’s platform supports schools who wish to integrate proven learning strategies throughout their programs in a pedagogically robust manner. The table below lists just a few studies highlighting the impact to student outcomes that these proven techniques enable.

We occasionally get questions on FERPA compliance so I thought I'd share some of our thoughts from working through these questions with our 20+ school partners. 

If we (Firecracker or any other service/product provider) are an institutional affiliate, schools can share Personally Identifiable Information (PII) with the service/product provider. This is usually well understood by our partners and common practice in the industry.