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Idiosyncrasy in Assessment Comments: Do Faculty Have Distinct Writing Styles When Completing In-Training Evaluation
Shiphra Ginsburg1, Andrea Gingerich2, Jennifer R Kogan3
1S. Ginsburg is professor of medicine, Department of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, scientist, Wilson Centre for Research in Education, University Health Network, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and Canada Research Chair in Health Professions Education; ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4595-6650.
Faculty have distinct writing styles that are consistent across trainees, influencing assessment data. Understanding these individual styles is crucial for accurate evaluation in medical education.
Area of Science:
- Medical Education Research
- Linguistics in Assessment
Background:
- Written comments are increasingly used for assessment in medical training.
- Faculty comments vary due to individual writing styles, unlike structured numeric scales.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate which writing style elements are determined by the faculty member versus the trainee.
- To identify stable, individual writing characteristics in faculty evaluations.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of in-training evaluation report comments from Internal Medicine programs (2012-2015).
- Utilized Linguistic Index and Word Count (LIWC) for language analysis.
- Applied Generalizability theory, correlations, and ANOVAs to assess faculty discrimination and demographic influences.
Main Results:
- Faculty were reliably distinguishable by LIWC metrics (word count, sentence length, "clout" words).
- These writing patterns were person-specific and not linked to faculty gender or rank.
- Writing styles showed no consistent association with trainee postgraduate year or gender.
Conclusions:
- Faculty possess identifiable and stable writing styles across different trainees.
- These idiosyncratic styles can be a source of construct irrelevance in evaluations.
- Accounting for individual writing styles is essential for meaningful interpretation of written comments.
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