The Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors Speaker Evaluation Form for Medical Conference Planners

No summative speaker evaluation form with validity and reliability evidence currently exists in the English medical education literature specifically to help conference planners make future decisions on speakers. We seek to perform a proof-of-concept evaluation of a concise, effective evaluation form to be filled out by audience members to aid conference planners.

We created the Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors (CORD-EM) form, a novel, three-question speaker evaluation form for the CORD-EM national conference and evaluated it for proof of concept. The CORD-EM form was analyzed with three evaluators and randomized to select only two evaluators' ratings to make results more generalizable to a generic audience evaluating the speaker.

Forty-six total evaluations ranged from 6 to 9 (mean ± standard deviation = 8.1 ± 1.2). The form demonstrated excellent internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.923) with good inter-rater reliability (intraclass correlation = 0.617) in the conference context.

The CORD-EM speaker evaluation form is, to our knowledge, the first evaluation form with early reliability and validity evidence specifically designed to help conference planners. Our results suggest that a short speaker evaluation form can be an effective instrument in the toolbox for conference planners.