Factors determining students’ global satisfaction with clerkships: an analysis of a two year students’ ratings database

• Published in: Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice Vol. 13; no. 4; pp. 495 - 502
• Main Authors: Durak, Halil İbrahim, Vatansever, Kevser, van Dalen, Jan, van der Vleuten, Cees
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.10.2008; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adult; Clinical Clerkship; Clinical Experience; Clinical Teaching (Health Professions); Education; Education, Medical, Undergraduate - methods; Educational Measurement; Educational Quality; Factor Analysis; Factor Analysis, Statistical; Feedback (Response); Female; Humans; Learning Processes; Male; Medical Education; Medical Schools; Multivariate Analysis; Original Paper; Participant Satisfaction; Personal Satisfaction; Premedical Students; Program Evaluation; Questionnaires; Regression (Statistics); Regression Analysis; Stepwise Regression; Student Attitudes; Student Surveys; Students; Students, Medical - psychology; Surveys and Questionnaires; Teacher Effectiveness; Teaching; Undergraduate Study; Clerkships; Factor analysis; Undergraduate medical education; Curriculum evaluation; Clinical teaching and learning; Students’ ratings
• ISSN: 1382-4996; 1573-1677
• DOI: 10.1007/s10459-007-9061-7

Clerkships would benefit from teachers’ improved understanding of the didactic aspects of their task. The purpose of this study is to identify factors that determine the teaching quality of clerkships and to examine the predictive value of these factors for students’ global satisfaction. Thus, results would be further reflected to clinical teachers’ tasks. These factors could then be taken into account in future clinical teaching. In this paper, a medical faculty’s 2 year data set of student feedback from a systematic programme evaluation project was used. A factor analysis was performed on 11,780 student questionnaires. Factor loads, and the Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of the questionnaire and factors were calculated. In order to examine the contributions of the factors to the students’ global satisfaction, the study included a multivariate stepwise regression analysis. The analysis revealed four factors, which together explained 60.24% of the variance: Structure & Process (44.66%); Time (5.8 %); Outcome (5.35%) and Input (4.39%). The Structure & Process factor was found to be the best predictor of students’ global satisfaction ( R 2  =   .537). Our conclusion is that “efforts to improve clerkship quality should focus on students’ learning processes and clerkship structure”.