Developing and testing an evaluation tool to measure clinical teaching

Teaching evaluation tools can be used to provide feedback to medical educators and help them improve their teaching skills. The purpose of this study was to develop a clinical teaching evaluation tool and test its efficacy.

The draft tool was developed based on clinical education literature and was modified by the stakeholder groups. To examine the quality of the instrument, content and construct validity, as well as reliability and fitness were analyzed. Content validity was tested by the stakeholder groups using a survey, and construct validity was verified by confirmatory factor analysis using LISREL 8.8. Internal consistency of items was assessed thorough Cronbach alpha estimation. Rasch analysis using Winstep 3.65 was performed to estimate the fitness of the tool.

The resulting tool consisted of 4 large categories, 25 small categories, and 43 items. According to the test results, the average importance of all 43 items was 4.03 (3.63 to 4.29). Cronbach alpha was 0.9689, and the correlation coefficients between the items were high. With regard to construct validity, 10 items needed minor modifications in the category setting. As the infit (0.76 to 1.23) and outfit (0.75 to 1.40) indices show, 42 items were fit to the item response theory.

The clinical teaching evaluation tool that has been developed in this study is valid and reliable and fits the item response theory. It can be used as an evaluation method in a variety of clinical teaching settings.