A randomised controlled study of role play in a faculty development programme

BACKGROUND

The Stanford Faculty Development Center at Stanford University has developed a teaching improvement course for medical teachers that has been widely disseminated using a train-the-trainer model.

AIMS

This study was designed to investigate the relative impact of role playing as an instructional technique within that course for facilitating change in teaching behaviours.

METHOD

From January 2009 to April 2010, six faculty development courses were delivered at Uppsala University Hospital to 48 physicians from different departments. The standard course presentation includes a range of instructional methods including short lectures, small group discussion, review of video re-enactments, role-play exercises and personal goal setting. For this study, participants were randomised to participate in (1) a 'standard' course with role play or (2) an 'alternative' course with no role play. The effects of the course on teaching performance were assessed with retrospective pre- and post-course self-ratings of 29 specific teaching behaviours.

RESULTS

Self-assessment ratings indicated significantly greater positive changes in teaching behaviour among faculty who attended the standard course (with role play) as compared to those in the alternative course (p = 0.015).

CONCLUSIONS

This study validates the commonly held view that role play is a useful instructional method for improving teaching.

Regional teaching improvement programs for community-based teachers

PURPOSE

Community-based clinical teachers provide an important cadre of faculty for medical education. This study was designed to examine the feasibility and value of an American College of Physicians-sponsored regional teaching improvement program for community-based teachers.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS

We conducted five regional (Connecticut, New Hampshire/Vermont, New York, Ohio, and Virginia) 1- to 2-day teaching-improvement workshops for 282 faculty (49% community based, 51% university based). The workshops were conducted by regional facilitators trained by the Stanford Faculty Development Program using large group and small group instructional methods to teach participants a framework for analyzing teaching, to increase their repertoire of teaching behaviors, to define personal teaching goals, and to identify the educational needs of their teaching site. Participants used Likert ratings [1 (low) to 5 (high) scale] to assess workshop quality, facilitator effectiveness, and rewards for and barriers to teaching in their clinics. Using retrospective pre- and postintervention ratings, participants also assessed workshop impacts on teacher knowledge, attitudes, and skills. Finally, participants completed open-ended questions to identify recommended changes to improve their clinic as an educational site for students and residents.

RESULTS

At all sites, participants evaluated the program as highly useful (4.6 +/- 0.6, mean +/- SD). Participants' ratings indicated that the program had a positive effect on their knowledge of teaching principles (4.0 +/- 0.9), an increase in their teaching ability (P <0.001), and an increase in their sense of integration with their affiliated institution (P <0.001).

CONCLUSIONS

Regional training of university and community faculty can be an effective way of promoting the improvement of teaching and the collaboration between community-based teachers and academic centers. National physician organizations and regionally based facilitators can provide important resources for the delivery of such training.

A pilot study of faculty development for basic science teachers

PURPOSE

Relatively little research has focused on faculty development methods that assist basic science teachers to improve their instructional skills. This study was designed to assess the effectiveness for basic science faculty of a faculty development seminar series that had been previously shown useful for clinical teachers.

METHOD

The Stanford Faculty Development Program's seminars on clinical teaching were adapted for basic science instruction. Eight pathology faculty participated in a series of nine small-group seminars designed to provide teachers with knowledge of a framework for analyzing teaching and identifying areas for improvement, and skill-based training in specific teaching behaviors. Each seminar included (1) brief lectures, (2) review of videotaped reenactments of teaching interactions, (3) role-play exercises with videotape review, and (4) formulation of personal and departmental teaching goals.

RESULTS

Program evaluation included multiple measures: participant self-assessment, student ratings of the participants, and blinded ratings of pre- and post-seminar videotapes of participants' classroom teaching. All measures indicated a positive effect of the intervention.

CONCLUSION

Faculty development programs have significant potential to enhance basic science instructors' teaching effectiveness.

Factorial validation of a widely disseminated educational framework for evaluating clinical teachers

PURPOSE

To examine an instrument for evaluating clinical teaching using factor analysis and to refine the validated instrument to a practical length.

METHOD

Factor analysis on a split sample of 1,581 student evaluations rating 178 teachers. The instrument was based on the seven-category Stanford Faculty Development Program's (SFDP's) clinical teaching framework and contained 58 Likert-scaled items, with at least seven items per category plus five items measuring "teacher's knowledge." Standard methodology for survey item reduction was used to remove items with low or complex factor loadings and iteratively remove items with low item-scale correlation. Results were replicated on the second sample.

RESULTS

The seven original categories emerged and items originally categorized under "knowledge" statistically combined with "promoting self-directed learning." Over 73% of the variance was explained. Item reduction resulted in 25 items with overall internal consistency over .97 and internal consistency of constructs ranging from .82 to .95.

CONCLUSIONS

Factor analysis of student ratings validated the seven-category SFDP framework. An abbreviated instrument to measure the seven categories is described. Results suggest that students may not systematically distinguish between their teachers' knowledge and their teachers' ability to promote self-directed learning, an important finding for both administrators and faculty development programs.

Beneficial and harmful effects of augmented feedback on physicians' clinical-teaching performances

PURPOSE

To evaluate whether clinical-teaching skills could be improved by providing teachers with augmented student feedback.

METHOD

A randomized, controlled trial in 1994 included 42 attending physicians and 39 residents from the Department of Medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine who taught 110 students on medicine ward rotations for one-month periods. Before teaching rotations, intervention group teachers received norm-referenced, graphic summaries of their teaching performances as rated by students. At mid-month, intervention group teachers received students' ratings augmented by individualized teaching-effectiveness guidelines based on the Stanford Faculty Development Program framework. Linear models were used to analyze the students' mean ratings of teaching behaviors at mid-month and end-of-month. Independent variables included performance ratings, intervention status, teacher status, teaching experience, and interactions with baseline ratings.

RESULTS

Complex interactions with baseline performance were found for most teaching categories at mid-month and end-of-month. The intervention-group teachers who had high baseline performance scores had higher student ratings than did the control group teachers with similar baseline scores; the intervention group teachers who had low baseline performance scores were rated lower than were the control group teachers with comparable baseline scores. The residents who had medium or high baseline scores were rated higher than were the attending physicians with comparable baseline scores; the performance of the residents who had low baseline scores was similar to that of the attending physicians with comparable baseline scores.

CONCLUSION

Baseline performance is important for targeting those teachers most likely to benefit from augmented student feedback. Potential deterioration in teaching performance warrants a reconsideration of distributing students' ratings to teachers with low baseline performance scores.

Protecting time for teaching in the ambulatory care setting

The current drive for efficient clinical teaching threatens the educational mission of academic medical centers. With pressures to increase clinical productivity, protected time and compensation for teaching have become scarce resources for clinical teachers in all settings. Although it may yield new approaches to education, the push for efficiency may ultimately result in insufficient time for teaching and may cause some clinical preceptors to stop teaching completely. Further, it may lead to the illusion that comprehensive teaching truly requires little time. Since the future of American health care depends upon the provision of high-quality clinical education to young physicians, this situation presents a potential national crisis. In this article, the authors discuss the complex nature of teaching, its time requirements, and the special challenges of teaching in outpatient settings. To avoid overemphasizing efficiency to the detriment of education they recommend adhering to two principles: (1) academic medical centers are educational as well as training institutions, and therefore should provide a broad-based education as well as training in clinical skills; and (2) the clinical teaching process is complex and adequate time must be provided for its many phases, including planning, instructing, and reflecting. Finally, the authors make recommendations for ensuring the delivery of high-quality education in ambulatory care settings.

Clinical teaching improvement: past and future for faculty development

Faculty development programs have focused on the improvement of clinical teaching for several decades, resulting in a wide variety of programs for clinical teachers. With the current constraints on medical education, faculty developers must reexamine prior work and decide on future directions. This article discusses 1) the rationale for providing faculty development for clinical teachers, 2) the competencies needed by clinical teachers, 3) the available programs to assist faculty to master those competencies, and 4) the evaluation methods that have been used to assess these programs. Given this background, we discuss possible future directions to advance the field.

Impact of a clinical preventive medicine curriculum for primary care faculty: results of a dissemination model

BACKGROUND

This study was designed to test a dissemination model for providing clinical preventive medicine (CPM) training to general internal medicine faculty across the United States.

METHODS

The model incorporated direct instruction of a few faculty as seminar facilitators who, in turn, taught a CPM curriculum to their faculty colleagues, who then could teach it to housestaff and students. The CPM curriculum consisted of six seminars that focused primarily on the risk factors for chronic diseases and on behavior change methods for modifying smoking, diet, and exercise.

RESULTS

Faculty who participated in the seminars had significant pre- to post-test increase in knowledge and reported self-efficacy to implement CPM strategies with patients, as well as changes in CPM clinical practices. These faculty, in turn, successfully disseminated CPM information to their housestaff, who also had increases in self-efficacy and changed clinical practices regarding CPM topics.

CONCLUSIONS

The successful implementation of the dissemination model attests to its viability as a mechanism for disseminating CPM curricula and increasing the emphasis on CMP issues in both clinical teaching and clinical encounters with patients.

Improving clinical teaching. Evaluation of a national dissemination program

This study assessed a dissemination approach to improve clinical teaching. We hypothesized that (1) physicians from a variety of institutions nationwide could be trained to conduct teaching improvement seminars for faculty colleagues; (2) such seminars would be perceived as highly useful; (3) pre/post self-evaluations by faculty participants and evaluations of faculty participants by house staff/students would indicate improved teaching performance. Selected medical faculty completed 1 month of facilitator training at the Stanford Faculty Development Program, Palo Alto, Calif. They then delivered teaching improvement seminars for other faculty. From 1986 to 1988, 12 facilitators from 12 institutions trained 107 faculty at their home institutions in their initial seminar series. Their seminars were rated as highly useful by participants. Both faculty self-assessments and house staff/student ratings indicated improved teaching performance. We concluded that this dissemination approach provides one possible mechanism for ongoing teaching improvement within institutions across the country.

Using the patient's history to estimate the probability of coronary artery disease: a comparison of primary care and referral practices

PURPOSE

According to probability theory, the interpretation of new information should depend on the prior probability of disease. We asked if this principle applies to interpreting the history in patients with chest pain. We compared the prevalence of coronary artery disease (CAD) in patients who had similar histories but who came from populations with different disease prevalence.

PATIENTS AND METHODS

We studied two high-disease-prevalence populations (patients referred for coronary arteriography) and two low-disease-prevalence populations (patients from primary care practices). We used clinical characteristics of one arteriography population to develop a logistic rule for estimating the probability of coronary artery narrowing. The number of clinical findings determined the logistic score, which was proportional to the prevalence of CAD.

RESULTS

The prevalence of CAD was much lower in the primary care population than in the arteriography population, even when patients with similar logistic scores, and thus similar clinical histories, were compared.

CONCLUSION

A clinician must take account of the overall prevalence of disease in the clinical setting when using the patient's history to estimate the probability of disease. Failure to observe this caution may lead to errors in test selection and interpretation.

Evaluation of the seminar method to improve clinical teaching

The effects of a seminar method to improve the teaching of ward attending physicians were evaluated. Forty-six attending physicians from four institutions were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The method was evaluated to assess its effects on attending physicians' performances and attitudes, and impact on learners. Evaluation methods included ratings of videotapes of ward rounds, teachers' subjective assessments of both their teaching performances and their experiences in the study, and trainee ratings. Videotape ratings, the teachers' own assessments, and the trainees' assessments of the attending physicians' impact on learning were significantly different, favoring the experimental group (p less than 0.05). It is concluded that the seminar method can provide the basis for effective and feasible approaches for improving clinical teaching by attending physicians.

Assessment by attending physicians of a seminar method to improve clinical teaching

The authors in this article present assessments by attending physicians of a seminar method to improve clinical teaching. An experimental study was conducted to determine whether or not the seminar method (a) is perceived by attending physicians as beneficial, (b) modifies the physicians' attitudes toward teaching, (c) enables attending physicians to define needed teaching changes, (d) motivates them to improve their teaching performance, and (e) is perceived as having long-term benefits. Forty-six inpatient attending physicians from four California institutions participated in the study. The physicians were randomly assigned to an experimental group which attended a seminar on clinical teaching or to a control group which received no such intervention. Questionnaires completed by the physicians indicated that the teachers who experienced the seminar method perceived it as beneficial, improved their attitudes toward clinical teaching, determined needed teaching changes, attempted to implement new teaching approaches, and perceived long-term benefits.

Evaluation of a method for improving the teaching performance of attending physicians

The effects of an intensive feedback method on the teaching performance of ward attending physicians were evaluated. Sixty-four attending physicians were randomly assigned to one of four experimental groups: (1) intensive feedback, (2) videotape control, (3) questionnaire feedback, or (4) questionnaire control. The method was evaluated using the teachers' subjective assessments, ratings of videotapes of ward rounds, and trainee ratings. Seventy-five percent of the intensive feedback group rated their treatment definitely beneficial in contrast to less than 13 percent of teachers in other groups (p less than 0.001). The intensive feedback group received higher post-treatment videotape ratings than the videotape control group, both on ratings of specific categories of teacher behavior (p = 0.03) and on ratings of overall teaching performance (p = 0.08). More intensive feedback teachers (40 percent) than videotape control teachers (6 percent) improved their personally identified problem teaching behaviors (p less than 0.05). Trainee ratings showed no significant difference between study groups. It is concluded that attending physicians can improve their teaching performance. Intensive feedback is one possible method of achieving that goal.

A study of the implicit criteria used in diagnosing chest pain

Although previous studies have reported the prevalence of coronary artery disease among patients with typical and atypical angina, criteria for the definition of these chest pain syndromes have not been well described. We studied the implicit criteria used by physicians to classify patients with chest pain. Five internists reviewed the histories of 190 subjects admitted to the hospital for elective coronary arteriography and rated each history as indicating either high or low risk of coronary disease. We applied logistic discriminant analysis to these ratings to create a decision rule for the classification of patients with anginal syndromes. The prevalence of confirmed coronary artery disease in subjects classified by the rule as at high risk was 0.83; the prevalence was 0.57 in subjects classified as at low risk. These prevalences are similar to those found for typical and atypical angina in previous large studies. We conclude that this linear model represents the physicians' decisions and provides criteria for defining anginal pain syndromes in certain settings.

Tuberculous pneumonia with the syndrome of inappropriate secretion of antidiuretic hormone: cause of the adult respiratory distress syndrome

Bilateral tuberculous pneumonia with the syndrome of inappropriate secretion of antidiuretic hormone was the cause of the adult respiratory distress syndrome in an elderly patient. Early recognition and prompt therapy enabled the patient to make a complete recovery without the necessity for mechanical ventilation. With the shift of care of tuberculous patients out of the sanitorium, the practicing physician should be aware of the varied manifestations of tuberculosis.