An Overarching, Holistic Trainee Evaluation Tool: The Product of Medical and Teacher Education Collaboration

• In Event: 29.039 - An Overarching, Holistic Trainee Evaluation Tool: The Product of Medical and Teacher Education Collaboration

Abstract

There is agreement that the medical and teacher education fields need better systems of and tools for developing and evaluating physician- and teacher-in-training competencies. There is far less agreement on what these development and evaluation systems and tools should be, though competency-based education and assessment (CBA) has gained significant traction in both fields. Yet the wholesale application of CBA rubrics to professional training risks reducing professional practice to checklists of discrete skills rather than assessing the interaction of those skills in a way that reflects the complexity of actual practice.

To inform theory and practice around debates about how to assess and teach professional practitioners, a team of teacher educators and a team of medical educators have collaborated to develop and test program practices and professional competencies within and across an innovative teacher education program. Guiding research and development questions in this work are:

• How might instructional and evaluation practices and tools in each domain be revised to reflect and advance changes in professional education practice?
• What are the feasibility, usability, reliability, and validity of the instructional and evaluation tools?
• What are the growth trajectories from novice to competent beginner to emerging expert practitioner over time?

In this session, an Internal Medicine Residency Program Director and educators from a School of Education (SOE) will describe how their collaboration across medical and teacher education fields has led to the development and use of an alternative, overarching, holistic tool to assess (and teach) their respective trainees.

The Internal Medicine Director will introduce his program’s resident evaluation tool called the “Resident Growth Chart/er (RGC),” and explain relevant paradigms of assessment that underpin it. The SOE presenters will introduce their pre-service teacher evaluation tool called the “Learning to Teach Growth Chart/er (LTGC),” and reinforce the common roots of both tools.

Both the RGC and the LTGC represent true shared mental models; they are qualitative/narrative tools that describe, using prose, “who we’d like our residents and pre-service teachers to be” at each stage of their development, and “how we’d like them to think and behave” as physicians-in-training and as student-teachers. The RGC is aligned with how physicians form diagnoses: a cognitive process which involves “problem representation” and use of illness scripts. And the LTGC is similarly rooted in an understanding of how veteran teachers plan, assess, and respond to students’ needs.

The presenters will demonstrate the power of their evaluation tools by having the audience use the LTGC and the RGC to evaluate video clips of student teaching and internal medicine residents’ behaviors.

The RGC and the LTGC represent usable tools that may, with further study, offer valid and reliable ways to assess trainee performance and mark their progress along an expected developmental "growth curve.”

We will also report the analyses of over 60 teaching intern and teaching resident evaluations. Results indicate that the tool is appealing and feasible, especially to attending teachers, but requires calibration to ensure that all scorers have a clear understanding of what the narratives represent.

Authors

• Jonathan Zimmerman, Oakwood Hospital - Dearborn

• Elizabeth Birr Moje, University of Michigan

• Emily Rainey, University of Michigan

• Bridget Leigh Maher, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Bob Bain, University of Michigan