Developing and Testing an Instrument to Measure the Effectiveness of Clinical Teaching in an Academic Medical Center

TLDR

Instruments that rate teaching effectiveness provide positive and negative feedback to clinician‑educators, helping them improve their teaching. The authors developed a theory‑based, generic Clinical Teaching Effectiveness Instrument for the entire Cleveland Clinic Foundation. Using an iterative qualitative process with stakeholders, they created a 15‑question, five‑point scale instrument, administered to medical students, residents, and fellows over 20 months, and tested for reliability, validity, and usability across all departments. The instrument demonstrated high internal consistency (correlation coefficients .57–.77), excellent reliability (g = 0.935), and both content and criterion‑related validity, proving usable and suitable for diverse clinical teaching settings.

Abstract

Instruments that rate teaching effectiveness provide both positive and negative feedback to clinician-educators, helping them improve their teaching. The authors developed the Clinical Teaching Effectiveness Instrument, which was theory-based and generic across their entire academic medical center, The Cleveland Clinic Foundation. They tested it for reliability, validity, and usability.In 1997, using an iterative qualitative development process involving key stakeholders, the authors developed an institution-wide instrument to routinely evaluate clinical faculty. The resulting instrument has 15 questions that use a five-point evaluation scale. The instrument, which was administered to medical students, residents, and fellows over a 20-month period, produced data that were rigorously tested for instrument characteristics, reliability, criterion-related and content validity, and usability.This instrument, implemented in all departments across the institution, produced data on a total of 711 clinician-educators. Correlation coefficients among the items were high (.57 to .77). The scores were reliable (g coefficient of 0.935), and the instrument had both content and criterion-related validity.The Cleveland Clinic's Clinical Teaching Effectiveness Instrument is reliable and valid, as well as usable. It can be used as an evaluation tool for a wide variety of clinical teaching settings.