Course/Curriculum Evaluation and Student Assessment Data Collected by the UW School of Medicine and Public Health

Demonstrating and improving the impact of an educational reform like Innovations in Medical Education (IME) depends upon collecting data that show post-reform improvements in: (a) the perceived effectiveness of the courses and workshops of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and (b) the doctoring skills of UW medical students, with assumptions that improvements in the former will produce improvements in the latter. Traditionally, medical school courses and the curriculum as a whole are evaluated by collecting student feedback through various evaluation forms, surveys, and focus groups, as well as through periodic peer review by faculty groups like the Educational Policy Council (EPC). Meanwhile, students’ doctoring skills are assessed by the UW’s Year End Professional Skills Assessment (YESPSA) exam, the first two steps of the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE), grades in medical school courses, and the skill ratings and grades provided by clerkship directors. Currently, collection and compilation of this data is fairly decentralized, making it difficult to fully utilize it in making decisions about the medical school curriculum. Furthermore, some of the data being collected is: (a) only occasionally recorded in databases or analyzed, due to insufficient staffing or inefficient collection procedures, (b) of questionable reliability or validity, due to a given question’s format or wording or the context in which the data is collected, and (c) not readily available to medical school administrators, members of the EPC, or others invested in curricular reforms. As a result, our current view of the development of UW’s medical school courses and the students who take them is rather piecemeal and myopic, even though a fair amount of data is being collected.