2024-2025 - Shiphra Ginsburg & Lynfa Stroud

The evaluation of clinical teachers remains problematic despite decades of research. Clinical teachers are practicing physicians who devote significant time and effort to teach medical students, residents and fellows within the context of providing clinical care. The primary (often only) measure of their teaching relies on evaluation or feedback from learners, yet there is little evidence that these evaluations (known as student’s evaluation of teachers, or SETs) are associated with students’ learning. SETs are also subject to bias and construct irrelevance which threaten their validity. Negative or critical SETs can be devastating to teachers’ identities, self-efficacy and wellness, yet there are no studies specifically exploring these negative consequences in medical education.

Our study will explore how negative or critical SETs affect clinical teachers in internal medicine at three institutions in Canada. We will interview up to 30 faculty using a constructivist grounded theory approach using sensitizing concepts from theories of identity and self-efficacy. Specifically we seek to learn how clinical teachers react to and process negative SETs, how it affects their identities, well-being, approach to teaching, and desire to remain teachers afterwards. We will also explore what participants feel we could be doing better and how we might improve the system to optimize feedback to clinical teachers while minimizing harm.

Our study is relevant to the MCC’s priority theme of assessment along the continuum of physicians’ careers. The medical education system relies heavily on clinicians to teach the next generation of doctors; we therefore must understand the negative consequences of SETs in order to ensure sustainability of this aspect of education. Our study also addresses a second theme, improving feedback from assessment results, by generating new knowledge that will inform improvements to our teacher assessment systems.