Tit-For-Tat Strategy for Increasing Medical Student Evaluation Response Rates

Abstract

IntroducationIt is essential for faculty to receive feedback on their teaching for the purpose of improvement as well as promotion. It can be challenging to motivate students to provide feedback to preceptors and fill out evaluation forms when not a clerkship requirement. Furthermore, there is concern that making the evaluations a requirement can compromise the quality of the feedback. The objective of this study was to identify an increase in the number of faculty and resident evaluations completed by students rotating through their Emergency Medicine clerkship following the implementation of a tit-for-tat incentive strategy.MethodPrior to the implementation of Tit-for-Tat, students rotating through their emergency medicine clerkship were asked to fill out evaluations of residents and faculty members with whom they worked. These were encouraged but voluntary. Beginning in the 2014–2015 academic year, a tit-for-tat strategy was employed whereby students had to complete a resident or faculty evaluation in order to view the student assessment completed by that resident or faculty preceptor.ResultsStudents submitted 1101 evaluations in the control, with a mean of 3.60 evaluations completed per student and 3.77 evaluations received per preceptor. Following the implementation of tit-for-tat, students submitted 2736 evaluations, with a mean of 8.19 evaluations completed per student and 7.52 evaluations received per preceptor. Both the increase in evaluations completed per student and evaluations received per preceptor were statistically significant with p-value <0.001.ConclusionThe tit-for-tat strategy significantly increased the number of evaluations submitted by students rotating through their emergency medicine clerkship. This has served as an effective tool to increase the overall number of evaluations completed, the number of evaluations each instructor received on average and the proportion of students that completed evaluations. Further work could be done to attempt to better assess the quality of the feedback from these evaluations.

Can Australian medical students’ predictions of peers’ responses assist with gaining reliable results on course evaluations?

“…Examples of strategies that may be employed in different settings to increase student response rate include grade point incentives, withholding grades until course assessment is completed, having course assessments accompany formative/ summative student assessments, reminder emails and teachers/instructors using class time to promote the importance of the course evaluations (Crews & Curtis, 2011;Guder & Malliaris, 2013). Several approaches regarding increasing survey response rates in general (not specifically course evaluations) have been assessed in medical student populations, with mixed results (Grava-Gubins and Scott, 2008;Malone, Carney, House, Cranford, & Santen, 2018). The relative effectiveness of incentivebased and instructor-based strategies to improve student response rates to online course evaluations has been reviewed previously (Goodman, Anson, & Belcheir, 2014).…”