The effect of two different faculty development interventions on third-year clerkship performance evaluations.

Clinical performance evaluations of medical students are a significant challenge for clinical faculty, clerkship directors, and medical educators. Ideally, performance evaluation grades should be an accurate reflection of each student’s clinical skills, free from bias, and accurately recognize both superior performance and failing performance. Unfortunately, clinical performance evaluations, when used to measure clinical competence, often contain multiple and confounding social, cognitive, and environmental sources of error.1 Studies suggest that individual raters use different strategies to recall and organize data about subjects.2,3 Even experienced raters cannot independently use five dimensions (ie, a 5-point Likert scale) simultaneously to rate performance and often need prompts to accurately recall data.4 Most faculty see students in a oneor two-dimensional framework of clinical skills and professional attributes and have difficulty differentiating the specific dimensions of clinical performance.5 Further, individual student performance is rarely observed. Most faculty depend on surrogate markers, such as case presentations and write-ups, to determine clinical competence, communication skills, and professionalism.1, 6-10 Judgments of performance and grades may not coincide.11-17 Grades are used for promotion, class rank, and ultimately residency positions and are a matter of public record. Researchers have noted a tendency for business supervisors to be more lenient in performance ratings used for promotion and salary increases than The Effect of Two Different Faculty Development Interventions on Third-year Clerkship Performance Evaluations