Defining differences in the instructional styles of community preceptors.

Background And Objectives: Variability exists in the instructional experiences of medical students in clinical settings. As relationships between community-based physicians and medical students expand, it is important to promote instructional styles that enhance teaching and learning. This study identified attitudes and approaches toward teaching that distinguish preceptors with high student ratings from those with lower ratings.

Primary care education: measuring instruction to improve quality.

The authors describe a validated instrument to measure instructional quality, using responses from first- and third-year medical students to assess ambulatory training sites.

Identifying the attributes of instructional quality in ambulatory teaching sites: a validation study of the MedEd IQ.

Background: Instructional quality in ambulatory settings may vary. The MedEd IQ is an instrument that measures unique aspects of the clinical instructional process. This study assesses the construct and factorial validity of the MedEd IQ.

Measuring instructional quality in community-orientated medical education: looking into the black box.

Objectives: Decentralizing medical education to community settings has raised issues of instructional quality. The need to evaluate community-based instruction accents the need to adopt a systems perspective, moving beyond factors known to comprise general clinical teaching effectiveness to include factors that focus on instruction as a process. Application of evaluation models using traditional input-output analysis can be flawed.

Exploring instructional quality indicators in ambulatory medical settings: an ethnographic approach.

Background And Objectives: As medical education moves to community settings, the quality of learning is influenced by differences in the practice environment, organization, resources, patient case mix, and demographics. This ethnographic study identified experiences and processes that influence student learning in community-based practice settings.

Methods: Trained field researchers conducted participant observation in eight community teaching sites.

Moving from policy to practice in curriculum change at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, East Carolina University School of Medicine, and SUNY-Buffalo School of Medicine.

A set of formative evaluation studies from the medical schools of the University of Virginia (UVA), East Carolina University (ECU), and the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY-Buffalo) portrays, in qualitative and quantitative terms, evidence of achievements and obstacles to the curricular reform supported by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Generalist Physician Initiative (GPI). In this paper, innovations in the under-graduate curriculum, a specific course, and instructional strategies are examined. Individual interviews of faculty and focus groups with students assessed opinions about curricular change at the University of Virginia.