QUALITY ASSURANCE OF EDUCATION IN SURGERY .1. APPROACH TO IMPROVING ITS QUALITY

Improving the quality of medical education is a worldwide challenge; s evere indictments of the quality of medical education can be stated. E valuation is a neglected field in medical education, and major deficie ncies exist in the evaluation of the instructional processes. The aim of this study is to describe the implementation and evaluation of qual ity assurance procedures into teaching medicine. This study describes, in part I, the Munich Curricular Innovation Project (MCIP) and its ev aluation as a component of quality assurance. This innovative project, serving as data source for this study, started in 1986 and is still o ngoing. A model is proposed that links medical education to quality as surance. It comprises a didactic, a motivational, and an evaluational approach, aiming at both the measurement of the instructional processe s and educational outcome. The evaluation consists mainly of direct ob servation of teaching (process evaluation records), a questionnaire in vestigating the motivation of students to learn, and the assessment of the acceptance of the MCIP by another questionnaire. Outcome measurem ents were undertaken by assessing product evaluation records and obser ving student performances in the skills labs. The evaluation, investig ated by this study, is based on quasi-experimental study designs and l ongitudinal studies, especially the iterative measurement. This case s tudy uses methods from qualitative data analysis such as field inquiry . This inquiry, designed as a case report without a control group, is descriptive and not prescriptive. It evaluates, in part II, the evalua tion established in the MCIP, thus performing a kind of meta-evaluatio n. The evaluation tools are evaluated using standards proposed by the American Psychological Association.