Outcomes of Student Evaluations of Rural and Nonrural Medical Student Preceptors

The University of Washington School of Medicine (UWSOM) and other medical schools utilize a distributed medical education (DME) model to train medical students in real-world community settings. An inherent challenge in this model is maintaining high-quality teaching across large geographic areas and clinical settings. This study compares student perceptions of rural and nonrural preceptor teaching in the UWSOM-required clerkships.

Our study analyzed 41,684 medical student evaluations of preceptors from six required clerkships and over 4 clerkship school years. Using the Rural-Urban Commuting Area definitions, we categorized individual evaluations as either "rural" or "nonrural". We used Welch's unpaired t tests and descriptive statistics to compare rural and nonrural evaluation results.

The evaluation data showed high ratings of preceptor teaching across all nine teaching evaluation categories for both rural and nonrural preceptors, with mean scores of 5.5 or higher on a 6-point Likert scale. Rural preceptors slightly outperformed their nonrural counterparts in seven out of nine teaching categories, including three categories reaching statistical significance.

Results suggest that Liaison Committee on Medical Education standards for comparable educational experiences are being met across distributed sites. We recommend a thematic analysis of student evaluation comments to contextualize the findings reported in our study.