Goodness of Fit of the Clinical Instructor Teaching Effectiveness Survey (CITES) for Health Professions Students

Student evaluations of teaching have demonstrated limited validity in traditional classrooms, but there is some evidence that they may be more useful in measuring teaching effectiveness in simulation or clinical environments. Current student evaluations of clinical teaching measure a subset of constructs designed for use by a single profession, which may limit institutional evaluation and make interprofessional evaluations challenging. The purpose of this study was to describe the multi-step creation of the CITES and to establish its internal consistency and goodness of fit for measuring students' perceptions of clinical instructor teaching effectiveness. In its second iteration, the CITES is a 25-item questionnaire that was tested among 161 physical therapy and physician assistant students. Most items, with the exception of item 5, demonstrated goodness of fit, with a standardized coefficient of 0.94. Internal consistency was high, with a Cronbach alpha of 0.96-0.97. Though this tool demonstrates internal consistency and goodness of fit, the test information curve indicated that it would be more useful as a screening tool to detect those who are very poor clinical teachers, rather than a tool to evaluate those who are highly effective at teaching.