Title: Teacher effectiveness: Can learner assessments play a role?
Author
Dr Saeda S Nair- Clinical Fellow, Anesthesia
Dr Anne Wong-Professor, Department of Anesthesia
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario
Introduction
Formative assessment of learners in medical education has predominantly focused on diagnosing and correcting learner deficiencies. However, learner assessments could also help in evaluating the effectiveness of our performance as teachers and the course material.
Methods
We conducted a case-based small group teaching session with anesthesia residents on the topic of “residents as teachers”.
The objectives of this session were to learn about educational theories, apply them to teaching in the clinical setting as well as to practice teaching skills.
A formative written quiz consisting of short answer questions was given at the end of the session.
Results
-The formative learner assessment give us an idea of whether the residents learned the material but it actually also gave us a lot of insight as to whether we effectively taught the material.
-The answers that the residents supplied were a clue as to what material was most salient and where most of the difficulties arose. The question on describing a theory was more challenging to students and we addressed it by relating theory to practice.
-The unique insight we gleaned from this experience is the underutilised potential for the use of formative learner assessment in improving pedagogy and informing curriculum development.
Discussion
Are Learner Assessment scores a reflection of teaching effectiveness?
- Assessment, whether written or verbal enhances memory and learning1.
- In higher education formative assessment has been used as a tool to measure outcomes and to identify what was done well in addition to areas for improvement.
- One of the potential sources of teacher effectiveness is based on measuring learning outcome measures but should be used cautiously for faculty evaluations as student performance is not only based on the teacher but also on such variables as student characteristics, the institution and the learning environment2.
- Value-added modeling is a method of teacher evaluation that measures the teacher's contribution in a given year by comparing the current test scores of their students to the scores of those same studentsin previous school years.However it ignores the complexities of testing and teacher effectiveness and serves as a cautionary tale to this use of learner assessment3.
Conclusion
We cannot directly compare the use of formative assessment in postgraduate medical education to value-added modelling in school education. However, based on our experience and literature review, the concept of using formative assessments as a component of a multimodal approach to assessing teaching effectiveness is underutilised and has the potential to help teachers further assess their own teaching effectiveness and inform curricular development. Further medical education research of this concept is warranted.
References
1. Roediger HL, Karpicke JD. The power of testing memory: Basic research and implications for educational practice. Perspect Psychol Sci.2006a; 1(3):181–210.
2.Berk RA .2005. Survey of 12 strategies to measure teaching effectiveness. Int J Teach Learn High Educ 17:48−62.
3. R. Chetty, J. N. Friedman and J. E. Rockoff . Measuring the impacts of teachers II: Teacher value-added and student outcomes in adulthood. National Bureau of Economic Research., 2013