How Do Medical Schools Use Measurement Systems to Track Faculty Activity and Productivity in Teaching?

Abstract

The authors describe their findings from a study that (1) identified 41 medical schools or medical school departments that used metric systems to quantify faculty activity and productivity in teaching and (2) analyzed the purposes and progress of those systems. Among the reasons articulated for developing these systems, the most common was to identify a "rational" method for distributing funds to departments. More generally, institutions wanted to emphasize the importance of the school's educational mission. The schools varied in the types of information they tracked, ranging from a selective focus on medical school education to a comprehensive assessment of teaching activity and educational administration, committee work, and advising. Schools were almost evenly split between those that used a relative-value-unit method of tracking activity and those that used a contact-hour method. This study also identified six challenges that the institutions encountered with these metric systems: (1) the lack of a culture of data in management; (2) skepticism of faculty and chairs; (3) the misguided search for one perfect metric; (4) the expectation that a metric system will erase ambiguity regarding faculty teaching contributions; (5) the lack of, and difficulty with developing, measures of quality; and (6) the tendency to become overly complex. Because of the concern about the teaching mission at medical schools, the number of institutions developing educational metric systems will likely increase in the coming years. By documenting and accounting financially for teaching, medical schools can ensure that the educational mission is valued and appropriately supported.

Time to Teach: Addressing the Pressure on Faculty Time for Education

“…A review in 2002 identified 41 schools that were using some kind of metric to quantify teaching activity [18]. Structured interviews with the schools' leadership identified a number of different and sometimes conflicting objectives for these projects: (1) to develop a systematic way to distribute funding, (2) to track the resources spent on teaching for the purpose of required reporting, (3) to address chairs' mistrust of the dean's office, (4) to counter the "myth" that faculty cannot afford to teach or are not compensated, (5) to provide incentives to teach, and (6) to raise the visibility and thus the value of teaching.…”

Measures of Educational Effort: What Is Essential to Clinical Faculty?

“…Pololi et al, 5 for instance, have already described faculty's desire that institutions "assign appropriate value to non-income-producing activities." Clinical faculty's educational efforts are measured in relative value units (RVUs), which are evaluated in two key ways 6 : the contact hour method (estimating the time allocated to educational efforts) and the relative value method (estimating the educational efforts, analogous to the resource-based relative value scale for clinical activities). Educational RVU systems have been developed by local departments and specific persons 7-12 and by organizations and medical councils, 13,14 the latter exemplified by the visionary and important report by Nutter and colleagues 14 for the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).…”

L’évaluation de l'enseignement : pour quelles décisions ?

“…Reconnaître l'enseignement comme une authentique activité universitaire, notamment pour des décisions de recrutement ou de promotion, implique d'évaluer cette activité. Différentes approches de ce type d'évaluation sont rapportées dans la littérature [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] . La majorité des expériences publiées concerne des systè-mes de quantification des activités d'éducation.…”