Comparison of resident and medical student evaluation of faculty teaching

Recognizing and rewarding teaching faculty are increasingly important to me dical schools and are often hampered by low perceived reliability and valid ity of measures of teaching ability The purpose of this study was to cross- validate two independently generated measures of reaching from medical stud ents and residents. A total of 2,318 medical student and 4,425 resident sco res for single-item measures of teaching ability for 129 teaching faculty m embers of a department of internal medicine over a 6-year period were compa red. Results showed that average reaching scores were higher for medical st udents than residents. Rank order of faculty were within 2 quintiles for th e two groups for over 901 of faculty. Highly discordant evaluations were se en for only 8% of faculty. The authors conclude the general concordance of two independent measures of teaching ability adds evidence to the existing literature of the validity of single-item measures of reaching ability from two different types of learners.