Elsevier

Ambulatory Pediatrics

Volume 1, Issue 3, May–June 2001, Pages 128-131
Ambulatory Pediatrics

A Pleasure to Work With—An Analysis of Written Comments on Student Evaluations

https://doi.org/10.1367/1539-4409(2001)001<0128:APTWWA>2.0.CO;2Get rights and content

Objective.—Studies assessing rating scales on student evaluations are available. However, there are no data related to the written comments on these evaluations. This study was designed to evaluate these comments.

Methods.—A content analysis was performed on the narrative section of pediatric clerks' evaluations. Final evaluations were obtained from 10 outpatient clinical sites staffed by full-time faculty over 14 months. A coding dictionary containing 12 categories (7 linked to clinical skills) was used.

Results.—One thousand seventeen comments on 227 evaluations were coded. The mean number of comments per evaluation was 4. Learner and personal characteristics were the largest categories. Normative comments, such as “good physical exam,” as opposed to more specific comments, such as “complete presentation,” predominated in all categories.

Conclusions.—Evaluation comments were infrequently related to basic clinical skills and were not often specific enough to lead to effective change in a student's performance. Faculty development is needed to make final evaluation comments more useful for students.

Section snippets

METHODS

Pediatrics is a 2-month, required clerkship at the Medical College of Wisconsin. The clerkship objectives are based on the Council on Medical Student Education in Pediatrics (COMSEP) general pediatric clerkship curriculum.9 The rotation is divided equally between the inpatient and outpatient setting. Since the focus of this study was on faculty evaluation of students, we studied outpatient evaluations only. Inpatient evaluations are completed by the entire ward team (including residents) using

RESULTS

Two hundred and sixty-one evaluations on 157 students were available for coding during the study time frame. Thirteen evaluations were missing. The mean number of evaluations per student was 1.6, with a range of 1–3. Seventeen evaluations (7%) had no comments, with an additional 17 (7%) evaluations omitted from the final analysis because the preceptor's only comment was “unable to judge the student's performance.” The remaining 1017 comments on 227 evaluations provided the data for the analysis.

DISCUSSION

Clerkship evaluations provide students with a summative evaluation of their performance. Optimally, this evaluation should inform audiences regarding the degree to which the student has met the objectives of the rotation as well as document the progress made in accomplishing his/her own personal learning objectives. Given the many responsibilities of faculty, these evaluations are frequently not a priority. Local efforts to improve both the completion and the quality of these evaluations have

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    The skills on which faculty focused were wide-ranging, including the process that residents used to make their way through an encounter, the content of their communication and physical examinations, the quality of their interpersonal skills, and promotion of patient-centered care. While all of these clinical skills are known to improve patient satisfaction and patient outcomes,30 assessment of these skills is often missed in the traditional precepting model where residents present patient findings and discuss management with supervising faculty, but are not observed.15,31,32 Use of the SCO method facilitates formative evaluation of the core competencies of professionalism, patient care, interpersonal and communication skills, and medical knowledge and the provision of focused and specific advice about how residents might improve their performance in the future based on observation of their current performance.

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This project was partially funded by a grant from the Learning Resources Subcommittee of the Curriculum and Evaluation Committee, The Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wis.

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