POSTER

Student's Perceptions of Feedback after Implementation of an Online Evaluation System in our Pediatric Junior Clerkship

Authors: M Broussard, PF Bass
Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, Shreveport, Louisiana

Background: Providing quality, timely feedback to medical students and using technology in Junior Clerkships are two hot topics in the current medical education literature. We have combined these two topics in our clerkship by using a complete on-line medical training management system to facilitate real-time on-line evaluations.

Hypothesis: We hypothesize that the use of an on-line evaluation system with real-time review by students improves the students' perceptions about feedback compared to using paper evaluation forms that the students do not review until after completion of the rotation.

Methods: Students in our Pediatric Junior Clerkship were evaluated using paper forms in the academic year 2005-6. The students rarely saw the feedback on these forms until after the completion of the 8-week clerkship. Students in 2006-7 are now evaluated using www.myevaluations.com. An 11-question survey where students rated statements (0 equals total disagreement and 100 equals complete agreement) about the amount and quality of feedback in our clerkship was emailed to all students completing our clerkship July 2005 through October 2006. The average rating for each statement was calculated for each group. These averages were then compared using a two-tailed T-test.

Results: Our preliminary data, presented in Table 1, includes 54 students from the "paper" group and 12 students from the "on-line" group.

Conclusions: While some of the questions trended toward improvement, it does not appear that real-time evaluation affected students' satisfaction with feedback in our clerkship. Our pilot study is limited by the small sample size in the on-line group. Data is still being collected.