Faculty development and career success in clinical teaching

To explore the effectiveness of overall faculty development (FD) programs in terms of three indicators of successful careers of clinical teachers (CTs): positive feedback (on personality traits or teaching skills) from students, teaching awards, and scholarly publications.

Data on student feedback, number of teaching awards, number of scholarly publications, and sum of FD participation hours in a teaching hospital with 23 clinical departments and 623 clinical faculty members (2019-2021) were collected and analyzed using Spearman's rank-order correlation coefficient (r_s) and independent-samples t-tests (with Welch's correction where appropriate).

The sum of FD hours was significantly associated with positive feedback from students (r_s = 0.15, p = .001) but not with teaching awards or publications. Furthermore, faculty members with more FD hours on research skills received better positive feedback from students regarding personal traits or teaching skills (Cohen's d = 0.60, 95% CI [0.34, 0.86], p < .001) and more teaching awards (Cohen's d = 0.34, 95 % CI [0.13, 0.55], p = .010) but did not have a greater number of publications (Cohen's d = 0.15, 95% CI [-0.07, 0.36], p = .780) than those with lower research FD hours. In addition, the number of teaching awards was significantly associated with positive feedback from students regarding personal traits (r_s = 0.92, p < .001) or teaching skills (r_s = 0.93, p < .001), and publication quantity (r_s = 0.13, p < .001) was markedly correlated with the number of teaching awards.

FD activities may provide positive impacts on CTs in terms of feedback from students and teaching awards but do not directly impact scholarly publications. However, faculty members who received teaching awards and positive feedback from students may have better scholarly publication performance.