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Educational autopsy: An innovative structured debrief for residency didactic teaching
Max Griffith1, Charles Brown1, Mary R C Haas2
1Department of Emergency Medicine Michigan Medicine Ann Arbor Michigan USA.
AEM Education and Training
|July 5, 2021
Summary
Educational autopsy (EA) provides more specific feedback for medical education presenters than traditional online evaluations. This method, however, saw a decrease in overall narrative feedback participation.
Area of Science:
- Medical Education Research
- Residency Training Programs
- Academic Medicine
Background:
- Traditional online evaluations for conference presenters often suffer from survey fatigue and provide suboptimal feedback.
- Educational autopsy (EA) is a postlecture group debriefing technique adapted for emergency medicine residency didactics.
- EA aims to collect timely, specific, and balanced feedback, fostering critical thinking about educational methods and supporting presenter portfolios.
Purpose of the Study:
- To evaluate the hypothesis that educational autopsy (EA) yields more specific and actionable feedback than traditional online evaluations.
- To compare the quality and characteristics of feedback generated by EA versus traditional methods.
- To assess the impact of EA on presenter feedback for academic promotion and professional development.
Main Methods:
- A comparative analysis of 4 months of presentation evaluations before and after EA implementation.
- Evaluation metrics included comment completion rates, comment presence, and comment categorization (specific, nonspecific, unclear).
- Specific comments were further classified by content: audiovisual design, speaker style, and educational methods.
Main Results:
- Presentations receiving comments via EA had no nonspecific comments, unlike 46% of those with traditional evaluations.
- EA significantly increased specific feedback on presentation design (91% vs. 63%), speaker style (66% vs. 24%), and educational methods (48% vs. 28%).
- EA eliminated unclear comments, whereas traditional evaluations produced unclear comments in 15% of cases.
Conclusions:
- Educational autopsy (EA) enhances the specificity of feedback for residency conference presenters.
- Despite improved feedback quality, EA implementation led to a reduction in the proportion of didactic sessions receiving narrative feedback.
- Further analysis is needed to address the drop-off in participation and optimize EA for comprehensive feedback collection.
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