Raising the bar: Can an Online Module With a Validated Tool Improve Clerkship Evaluations?

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Health Professions Education

Background:

• Narrative evaluations are vital for assessing medical students' performance but often lack consistent quality.
• Faculty development for improving narrative evaluations can be resource-intensive and difficult to mandate.
• The Narrative Evaluation Quality Instrument (NEQI) is a validated tool for assessing narrative evaluation quality.

Purpose of the Study:

• To implement and assess a time-efficient faculty development intervention to enhance the quality of narrative evaluations.
• To evaluate the feasibility of using the NEQI as a feedback tool in faculty development.

Main Methods:

• Eighty-nine faculty from two clerkships were randomized into a control group (no feedback) and an intervention group.
• The intervention group received an educational module and individualized NEQI data via email.
• Pre and post NEQI scores were compared between groups.

Main Results:

• No significant differences in NEQI scores were observed between the control and intervention groups.
• Subgroup analysis of faculty who completed the module also showed no statistically significant improvement.
• The intervention demonstrated feasibility across both participating clerkships, with a trend toward increased comment specificity.

Conclusions:

• A time-efficient, email-based faculty development intervention using NEQI feedback was feasible but did not measurably improve narrative evaluation quality.
• Potential reasons for the lack of improvement include intervention timing and limited observation opportunities.
• Future research should investigate AI-assisted scoring and standardized templates to enhance narrative evaluation quality in medical education.