A teaching encounter card to evaluate clinical supervisors across clerkship rotations

Evaluation of faculty teaching is critical to improving the educational experience for both students and faculty.

Our objectives were to implement an evaluation system, using the teaching encounter card, across multiple rotations in the clerkship and determine the feasibility, reliability and validity of this evaluation tool in this expanded setting.

Students were asked to rate clinical supervisors on nine teaching behaviours using a 6-point rating scale and asked whether they would like to nominate the teacher for a clinical teaching award.

A total of 3971 cards for 587 clinical supervisors across seven clerkship rotations were analyzed. There was an average of 7.3 cards per supervisor (median = 5, range 2-66). There was high internal consistency between items on the card (Cronbach's alpha 0.965). The reliability was fair at 0.63. Seventeen cards per supervisor would be required to achieve a reliability >0.8 (G study). Ratings were higher for encounters that occurred in the operating room and within the anaesthesia rotation. The teachers who had a positive recommendation for teaching award nomination received higher scores than their colleagues.

We successfully implemented a faculty evaluation card across clerkship rotations that was flexible enough to use in multiple learning environments and allowed the identification of outstanding clinical teachers.