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The influence of student interest on teaching evaluation
1University of Louisville Department of Medicine, Kentucky 40292.
Objectives:
To analyze the influence of student subject bias on the evaluation of didactic teaching.
Design:
Prospective study evaluating the relationship between the interest of junior students in 30 clinical topics and the students' subsequent evaluations of lecturers for these topics.
Setting:
University internal medicine junior core curriculum.
Participants:
56 junior students. Lecturers were senior internal medicine residents.
Intervention:
None.
Measurements And Main Results:
There was no correlation between mean student interest scores for the topics and either immediate or end-of-rotation lecturer evaluation scores (R = -0.14 and 0.09 and p = 0.47 and 0.61, respectively). For 20 of 30 topics (66%) more than 50% of the students assigned the same level of high, intermediate, or low interest. There was no significant difference (p = 0.84) in the mean lecturer evaluation scores for these three divergent groups. Analysis of individual lecturers' evaluation scores revealed stratification to a given range independent of student interest in the topic.
Conclusions:
Students do not appear to be biased by their degree of interest in a subject when evaluating teaching skills. It appears unlikely that specific teaching assignments need to be considered when evaluating competence in didactic teaching.