Enhancing Learning and Teaching Through Student Feedback in Medical and Health Sciences

Chenicheri Sid Nair, Patricie Mertova

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781843347521
• eBook ISBN: 9781780634333
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Evaluation & Assessment in Education

Student feedback has appeared in the forefront of higher education quality, in particular the issues of effectiveness and the use of student feedback to improve higher education teaching and learning, and other areas of student tertiary experience. Despite this, little academic literature has focussed on the experiences of academics, higher education leaders and managers. The final title in the Chandos Learning and Teaching Series to focus on student feedback, Enhancing Learning and Teaching through Student Feedback in the Medical and Health Sciences expands on topics covered in the previous publications, focussing on the medical and health science disciplines. This edited title includes contributions from experts in higher education quality, and student feedback from a range of countries, such as Australia, Europe, Canada, the USA, the UK, South East Asia and India. The book is concerned with the practices of evaluation and higher education quality in medical and health science disciplines, with particular focus on student feedback. The book begins by giving a discipline-specific overview of student feedback in medical and health sciences, before moving on to take a global perspective. The penultimate chapter considers the accountability of student evaluations in health and medical sciences, before a conclusion summarises the practices of student feedback and accountability in medical and health sciences, and suggests future improvements. - Links student feedback in medical and health science disciplines to establishing a better understanding of its forms, purposes and effectiveness in learning - Provides international perspectives on student feedback in medical and health sciences - Compares student feedback with key examples of best practices and approaches to enhancing learning/teaching through student feedback in the medical and health sciences

1

Evaluating Student Experiences of Medical Education in the Joint Medical Programme: a Case Study of a Unique Dual University Programme

Robyn Smyth University of Southern Queensland

Ian Symonds University of Newcastle

Cathryn McCormack Southern Cross University

Abstract

Establishing a medical education programme in which the students are shared between two universities and regarded as a single cohort is only one complexity of an initiative begun in regional Australia in 2008. The University of Newcastle in New South Wales, which has a problem-based learning medical programme of considerable repute, partnered with the University of New England with a view to increasing understanding of rural perspectives and prompting more graduates to remain in rural locations. Assuring the quality of student outcomes was a high priority, requiring innovative approaches to devise appropriate program evaluation measures designed specifically to accommodate the unique features of the Joint Medical Programme. This chapter details the initial trials of purpose-designed instruments and methodologies and makes an initial valuation of their efficacy.

Keywords

Medical education programme

evaluation

quality assurance

Acknowledgements

Many staff of the JMP contributed to the conceptualisation and refinement of the evaluation approach and instruments and although they are unnamed, their contributions are appreciated.

Introduction

The Joint Medical Programme (JMP) is a unique initiative in the context of medical education in Australia. It is a partnership between two universities and two local health districts intended to promote training of doctors in rural settings with a view to increasing the rural doctor workforce. Two characteristics which make the JMP unique include the circumstances of each university and the regional and rural locations of these institutions, separated as they are by 400 kilometres. For more than 30 years, the University of Newcastle (UoN) has been renowned internationally for provision of a problem-based learning (PBL) approach (Henry, Byrne, & Engel, 1997) to medical education and is located in a large regional centre serviced by several major teaching hospitals. The University of New England (UNE) is a regional university renowned for its distance learning courses, and is located in a small highland rural city midway between Sydney and Brisbane. It has access to one large regional base hospital, several rural referral hospitals, and a range of small community hospitals.

The JMP cohort of students is a shared cohort, split 110:60 between UoN and UNE, with opportunities provided for all students to move between the two primary locations and five clinical schools during their training. In particular, students must undertake a minimum of four weeks of rural clinical placements and may spend up to a year in a rural area during the final two years of their training. These clinical placements are located across northern areas and the central coast of New South Wales. They provide a range and variety of rural and regional settings in which students are able to experience the diversity of primary, rural, referral, and tertiary medicine.

As part of its registration with the Australian Medical Council (AMC), the governing body for medical education, the JMP is regarded as a single entity delivering a single programme. Delivering such a programme, where two separate universities collaborate to deliver approved student outcomes in the context described above, makes the JMP a unique and particularly complex enterprise. From student management, teaching, learning, and evaluation perspectives, an enormous effort has been directed at achieving equity and coherence, since pre-existing student management and teaching and learning systems at both institutions were not interoperable, and the distance between UoN and UNE required duplication of most administrative and many teaching functions. New processes were devised for cohort management for all aspects of the JMP, from admission to learning management systems, video-conferencing, examination supervision and handling, teacher evaluation, peer review, course/programme quality assurance, and ongoing evaluation. Where possible, established practices were adopted or adapted. For example, admission procedures retained established interview practices with innovation continuing to inform selection (Hurwitz, Kelly, Powis, Lewin, & Smyth, in press). Additionally, the nature of academic staff appointments resulted in the trialling of many new or amended approaches and processes. Other than core academic appointments, these were a mix of sessional and casual contracts, fixed term appointments, and many guest lecturers drawn on a voluntary basis from a pool of local practitioners in an effort to embed rural perspectives. This mix presented opportunities to expand online learning and technology use to support student engagement and maximise efficiency.

Acknowledging these complexities, the JMP appointed the first author, Robyn Smyth, as academic developer, with her position jointly funded by UoN and UNE. One of her many responsibilities was co-ordinating the JMP evaluation.

In terms of approaches to teaching and learning, the Newcastle PBL model was adopted, with the addition of joint lectures via videoconferencing. Lecturers were invited to trial lecture capture, videoconference recording, personal response systems in lectures, new ways of structuring lectures, and other innovations. Lecturers were also provided with professional development resources to assist preparation of presentations and structure of teaching. PBL tutors in both locations were recruited from among available general practitioners, relevant sciences academics, and others; all received tutor training in PBL and were mentored during their initial semesters. Each of these activities was intended to improve student outcomes, and so students were asked for formative and summative evaluation (Biggs, 1991). The UNE students voluntarily undertook to provide additional feedback on lectures through the efforts of the UNE Medical Students Association, which initiated focus group discussions about improvement (Fraser, Smyth, Walker, & Whitfield, 2010, 2011).

The subject of this chapter is the approach devised to evaluate learning and teaching in this PBL programme, gathering consistent data across the whole cohort. Although each university had established mechanisms for collecting students’ feedback on teachers and courses, these only sampled those students enrolled at each respective university and were not always well suited to evaluating teaching in the medical setting. Hence, there was a need to develop a new set of instruments administered across all JMP students and unique to that programme. The challenges outlined briefly above made traditional course and teacher evaluation ineffectual because cohort data was required, particularly in relation to learning in a PBL curriculum where one tutor usually works intensively with ei...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright page
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• Author biographies
• 1: Evaluating Student Experiences of Medical Education in the Joint Medical Programme: a Case Study of a Unique Dual University Programme
• 2: Using Student Feedback to Enhance Teaching and Learning in an Undergraduate Medical Curriculum: the University of Hong Kong Experience
• 3: Feedback as Conceptualised and Practised in South East Asia
• 4: Enhancing Clinical Education with Student Feedback: a Thai Perspective
• 5: Student Feedback in Medical and Health Sciences: an Indian Perspective
• 6: Clerks’ and Residents’ Contributions to Building a Safe Educational Environment in a Medical Teaching Hospital: the Role of a System of Educational Quality Management (SEQM)
• 7: Approaches to Student Feedback in the Health and Medical Sciences
• Index