From leadership research to district action: Exploring “Talent” in Medical Education: A Scoping Review

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: review-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Background: The term ‘talent’ appears in health professions education (HPE) but is variably defined and often conflated with performance proxies. Through a scoping review, the authors sought to map how ‘talent’ and related terms are used/defined in medical education across stages and use cases. Methods: A scoping review (Arksey-O’Malley; Levac; PRISMA-ScR) with descriptive mapping and content analysis of charted items was performed. The search was conducted across OVID-Medline, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science, focusing on studies related to talent in medical education from 1946 to May 20, 2024. The authors included not only the term talent but also broadened the review to include adjacent concepts, such as aptitude and giftedness. Two reviewers independently assessed titles, abstracts and full texts using predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. A third reviewer resolved screening discrepancies. Relevant concepts were mapped for reporting, and a content analysis identified research gaps, trends, and patterns across global, regional and specialty contexts. The papers were tiered into two groups: Tier 1, directly mentioning the term talent; Tier 2, adjacent terms often related to talent. Findings: The authors reviewed 189 studies loosely related to talent in medical education: 47 (25%) were Tier 1 papers that directly mentioned talent, and 142 (75%) were Tier 2 (adjacent terms). The literature primarily originated from North America (41%, 77/189) and Europe (30%, 56/189) Most papers focused on identifying individuals with high potential (74%, 141/189), particularly in medical school selection, while less attention was given to themes like retention, equity and leadership. Conclusion: Although 47 papers contained the term “talent”, there was a paucity of papers that defined talent within medical education or applied a framework/theory. Interdisciplinary research may be a way to better introduce this concept to our field.

Study methods

Our study followed the six-step Arksey and O’Malley framework for scoping reviews [23], enhanced by Levac et al.’s guidance for methodological rigour [24]. We adhered to the PRISMA-ScR reporting guideline to ensure transparency and reproducibility [25]. The detailed step-wise approach is outlined in the following paragraphs.

Limitations

This study is not without its limitations. Firstly, we did not conduct an exhaustive literature search across all databases. The inclusion of interdisciplinary databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, and OVID-Medline, coupled with a broad search strategy, provided us with a large evidence base to capture relevant information. However, in our particular search, we note that heterogeneity in the terms used across the fields of medical education and health professions education may have led to under-identification of papers. Second, only studies in the English language were included in the review. Thirdly, we note a strong tie between the terms we found in the literature and our expanded synonym terms, which is unsurprising but certainly worth mentioning, as it affects the reader’s interpretation of both Table 1 and Appendix F. The Adjacent band includes broad performance terms; we attempted to mitigate construct drift by presenting Core vs Adjacent analyses. Finally, we did not include an assessment of the quality or rigor of included studies, which may limit our ability to evaluate the quality and strength of the evidence.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Rebecca Preyra; Sujata Mishra; Heba Khan; Shreya Saha; Armaanpreet Dhillon; Amy Keuhl; Sandra Monteiro; Elizabeth M. Wooster; Michael Gottlieb; Alexander Peever; Teresa M. Chan. Exploring “Talent” in Medical Education: A Scoping Review. Perspectives on Medical Education (2026-02-04). https://doi.org/10.5334/pme.1859

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.