gms | German Medical Science

Objectives: How quality of clinical teaching may be described and how expertise in this field might develop is not clear [1]. Consequently qualitative research is needed to generate more theory driven models to understand clinical teaching, and to improve didactical training. We attempted to describe the development of expertise in clinical teaching by a multidimensional observational design. As quality criteria we used 10 categories of teaching quality for which a sound evidence base is acknowledged in school teaching [2], [3].

Methods: Clinical teaching sessions of 50 minutes with a group of 5-6 3rd year students in emergency medicine were analysed using the following dimensions:

1.

structured analysis of the video recording by external experts

2.

evaluation by participating students using a questionnaire

3.

self-evaluation by the clinical teacher immediately after the session

4.

“think-aloud” protocol by the teacher reflecting about on video recording

5.

“think-aloud” protocol by the standardised patient (SP) on the video recording

All dimensions were matched with each other in a sense of “multiple triangulation”.

Results: 44 teaching sessions with 32 teachers were analysed by the described design. Teacher’s and student’s feedback stated no major interference of the study setting with their teaching encounter. More than 95% of the questionnaires were usable, video recordings and TA protocols were of sufficient quality. All 10 categories of teaching quality were applicable.

Conclusion: The method is feasible and seems to generate sufficient data on teaching quality. It is possible to correlate different perspectives on the teaching session with each other. Whether the design is useful to describe the development of expertise in clinical teaching remains to be proven by cross-sectional samples.