Development and Implementation of a Clinical Dental Faculty Evaluation Instrument.

Abstract

The aim of this study was to develop and test the reliability of an instrument to evaluate the quality of clinical teaching among dental school faculty. Fourth-year dental students' perspectives on effective clinical teaching were first collected in focus group meetings. An 11-item questionnaire to assess seven domains of clinical teaching was developed based on the collected student perspectives and a medical model. All 374 third- and fourth-year dental students at one U.S. dental school in 2015 were invited to evaluate four clinical instructors whom they felt were strong role models and four clinical instructors whom they felt would benefit from constructive criticism. The survey was completed by 139 students (37.2% response rate); they evaluated 96 dental instructors. The results showed that the survey demonstrated strong internal reliability, with Cronbach's alpha values of >0.95 for each of the seven domains. In addition, there was significant agreement between groups: the interclass correlation (ICC) ranged from 0.97 to 0.99. These results suggest that the clinical faculty evaluation instrument developed in this study is a reliable method that can be used to evaluate dental faculty members. This system can be a valuable guide for clinical faculty members and administrators in assessing and improving clinical teaching effectiveness.