Associate Professor Mount Sinai Health System New York, NY, US
Introduction: Validated tools, such as the System for Evaluation of Teaching Qualities (SETQ) questionnaire, can improve the quality of resident education and its outcomes by providing neurosurgeon educators with regular structured feedback on teaching performance. Although we previously demonstrated an overall increase in teaching scores following the implementation of SETQ in a large academic neurosurgery department, individual faculty exhibited heterogeneous patterns of improvement. The goal of this study was to scrutinize these patterns more closely in order to identify driving factors that might inform the development of tailored strategies to assist faculty in achieving excellence in surgical teaching.
Methods: Teaching performance data were collected from trainees in our department using a modified version of the SETQ instrument every six months for 7 years. Cycle-to-cycle summative score variances were used to divide faculty into subgroups for analysis. For each subgroup, survey item variances were examined to identify the strongest correlates of change in the summative score using a cutoff R^2 value of 0.90. Top-ranking items in each subgroup were compared by item category to determine the hierarchical relationship of categories.
Results: 8648 survey item scores for 46 teaching faculty were available for analysis. Faculty were clustered into 4 groups based on the average cycle-to-cycle variance in summative score, which ranged from 4.2 to 26.2 on a 220 point scale. Across all faculty, survey items addressing frequency of evaluation of trainees correlated most strongly with summative score variance. In the faculty subgroup analysis, providing feedback to trainees, learner centeredness, and professional attitude were increasingly important item categories as summative score variance increased.
Conclusion : This long-term analysis of trainee-assigned scores on the SETQ instrument suggests that residents employ a hierarchy of attributes when judging the teaching performance of faculty. This hierarchy will have utility in devising individualized, step-wise faculty development plans to foster teaching excellence.
