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Competency-Based Veterinary Education (CBVE) Drives Increased Use of Digital Simulations and AI

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:59:50 GMT

by Duncan Ferguson.

Competency-Based Veterinary Education (CBVE) Drives Increased Use of Digital Simulations and AI

At the end of my formal academic career a decade ago, I chaired a “pre-clinical” department responsible for instruction in veterinary anatomy, physiology, histology, neurobiology, pharmacology and toxicology. Since then, the veterinary education has experienced multiple waves of seed changes. Even in 2016, there were the expense and public sensitivity to the use dead animals for instruction, and the concern over student exposure to embalming solutions. The use of live animals for laboratories and surgical practice had long been limited on animal humane grounds.

The introduction of a new curriculum 15 years ago at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine brought first and second year students into 8 weeks of clinical blocks alongside final-year students. It quickly became apparent that these students were eager but not properly prepared to appreciate this early clinical exposure’s value in enhancing the relevance of the pre-clinical classroom instruction. The curricular result was expansion of the Clinical Skills Laboratory and of the nature of Objective Subjective Clinical Examinations (OSCEs). At first these focused on the manual processes associated with clinical practice: draping a patient, tying surgical knots, etc. They were not initially designed to evaluate clinical reasoning skills. As a simple example, we still evaluated first and second-year student competency with dosage calculation with a set of online multiple-choice quizzes. The “on-the-fly” assessment of their interpretation of an antibiotic culture and sensitivity, and prescribing ability was only going to come later.

Then, the Competency-Based Veterinary Education (CBVE) initiative by the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges moved through its phases to the now refined 32 Competencies in 9 Domains with granular performance Milestones, and 8 Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) https://www.aavmc.org/resources/competency-based-veterinary-education/cbve-education-2-0-model/ . Veterinary schools, particularly the newly developed ones, are designing their curricula around this framework, and existing schools are trying to identify where these competencies are taught and/or redesigning their curricula to ensure that they are.

As a recent narrative review describes, the educational simulation technology, clinical skills labs, and externally constructed competency framework are now being supplemented by artificial intelligence (AI).¹

The potential of AI is not only in its “out-of-the-box” capability to create multiple choice questions for a student,² or pass an examination ³, although the capabilities of the AI models are becoming more and more impressive. It is about the potential to interact with specialized or even customized medical professional information in databases (knowledgebases), and about the potential to interact with simulators to customize learning experiences.¹ Large Language models (LLMs) can help faculty identify where in a curriculum the competencies are being taught and evaluate whether student progress is being adequately measured against the Milestone standards.

I can recall the excitement in the early 1990’s when videodisks of interactive educational programs were going to change the nature of veterinary education. However, the subsequent pace of development was slow, and the external review and national or international standards not yet developed. Four decades later, the veterinary profession now could work virtually and collectively on educational programs and standards with the aid of AI. The costs of educationally effective approaches might be higher, but our we can no longer afford the tendency to reinvent the wheel at each of our institutions. The truth is that we never could, but we also probably never gave faculty the credit necessary for inter-institutional cooperation on educational research and development, like we did for other kinds of research. There are examples of such inter-institutional cooperation over AI-driven simulated experiences for medical students.⁴ Why shouldn’t we work together to conduct the necessary educational research in a cooperative manner? Our curricula, faculty, and, certainly, our students deserve it.

References

1. Zhang H, Li A,Ying Li, Nab F, Dong H, Ma Y: Simulation, artificial intelligence, and competency-based frameworks in veterinary medical education: a narrative review. J Vet Sci. 2026 May;27(3):e37 https://vetsci.org/DOIx.php?id=10.4142/jvs.25194

2. 2. Sousa SA, Flay KJ (2025): A survey of veterinary student perceptions on integrating ChatGPT in veterinary education through AI-driven exercises. J. Vet. Med. Ed. 52(6): 734-742.
https://doi.org/10.3138/jvme-2024-0075

3. 3. Coleman MC, Moore JN (2024): Two artificial intelligence models underperform on examinations in a veterinary curriculum. JAVMA 262(5):692-697.
https://doi.org/10.2460/javma.23.12.0666

4. 4. Hicke Y, Geathers J, Vu K et al. (2026): MedSimAI: Simulation and formative feedback generation to enhance deliberate practice in medical education. In LAK26: 16th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference, April 27-May 01, 2026, Bergen, Norway. ACM, New York, NY, USA. 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3785022.3785092

Moving Evidence-Based Education Blog Back to this Site

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:35:52 GMT

by Duncan Ferguson.

Hi everyone,

Our new Moodle theme allows for blogging at this site, and we thought we'd move the Education-Based Blog back here. Look for new posts soon, but we wanted to get the idea so we trotted out some ancient (~10 yo) but hopefully timeless posts that were from the beginning of VetMedAcademy's existence. Don't hesitate to add comments!

Cheers,

Duncan

Teaching Physics vs. Teaching Vet Med - Aren't There Parallels?

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:40:50 GMT

by Duncan Ferguson.

I was once told by an Associate Dean for Academic Affairs that their school had looked at the grades of single pre-vet course series correlated best with grades of a student during the first 3 years of vet school. That course series was Physics. The instruction of students in conceptual and practical areas occurs in all areas of science. This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describes Physics Professor Eric Mazur's recognition as he taught at Harvard that the traditional classroom lecture without interaction and without a focus on practical problem-solving, "had to go." Practical issues aside (this article addresses resistance from faculty in other scientific disciplines), what really is the difference between teaching students for longterm understanding of physics and teaching understanding of physiology, pharmacology, etc?

https://shar.es/1Jp7lK

"Powerful principles of reasoning, once learned, will never decay."

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:37:35 GMT

by Duncan Ferguson.

In his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "Thinking for Dummies" Richard Nisbett suggests 5 strategies to encourage students to think critically. The quote from this article in the title says as strongly as one can imagine why we need to spend more time on helping future clinicians learn to reason.

Meta-Analysis on Critical Thinking

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:42:05 GMT

by Duncan Ferguson.

In this month's Review of Educational Research, there is a meta-analysis study by Huber and Kuncel entitled "Does College Teach Critical Thinking? A Meta-Analysis" (see attached). This and other related studies can be found at: http://rer.aera.net

This meta-analysis of 77 educational studies concludes that college itself tends to improve critical thinking as measured by general critical thinking skills tests like the Watson-Glaser or California Critical Thinking Test or the Cornell, Level Z test. However, they note that nursing has instituted as part of its accreditation requirements, training in critical thinking, and they chose to evaluate these studies separately, noting that systematic program-long efforts such as have been taken in nursing training has led to improvements in general critical thinking, but more importantly in discipline-specific critical thinking. Why shouldn't we seek the same for veterinary medicine?