The development of a participant questionnaire to assess continuing medical education presentations

Feedback on presentation skills is important for developing skilled educators, but often this feedback is based on evaluation tools that have been developed with little concern for psychometric issues or for how the information will be used for feedback. The purpose of this study was to develop a reliable participant questionnaire to assess the quality of continuing medical education (CME) presentations and to provide presenters with feedback.

The questionnaire was developed using an iterative approach, with doctors as raters, and tested during a variety of CME presentations. The resulting questionnaire consists of 9 items rated on a 7-point Likert scale. The psychometric analysis reported in this paper was completed using data from grand rounds presentations.

Psychometric analysis, based on 319 evaluations from 17 presentations (average of 19 evaluations/presentation), revealed a high level of reliability (0.91), indicating that the items met a reasonable standard and that the raters were discriminating between the quality of the presentations adequately.

This 9-item, participant questionnaire provides a reliable measure of the quality of CME presentations, while also providing presenters with useful feedback. Further studies will investigate if this instrument can be used to assess other CME formats and how best to provide feedback to presenters.