2010 Volume 41 Issue 5 Pages 325-335
In Japan, awareness has increased in recent years of the importance of evaluating clinical educators. In Europe and North America, the Objective Structured Teaching Evaluation (OSTE), which employs standardized students, multiple stations, video recording, and scoring by multiple observers, is used to evaluate clinical educators. We report on the implementation of an OSTE in Japan.
1) Ten clinician-educator physicians participated in the OSTE, which comprised 5 stations and included standardized residents. The stations were video-recorded, and the educators were assessed by 7 different evaluators.
2) The educators were evaluated with a checklist and a 5-point scale. We assessed the reliability and validity of the checklist and analyzed the background characteristics of the clinician educators.
3) The factors most closely associated with high ratings on the checklist and the 5-point scale were: having a history of attendance at a seminar for clinician-educators, having greater than 5 years experience as an educator, and not being an internist. There was no interobserver variability among the evaluators.
4) The generalizability of the checklist was 0.81, and its reliability index was 0.83. The correlation coefficient between the total scale score and the checklist score was 0.8.
5) Although biases by participants were identified, our project suggests that the OSTE could be used in Japan to objectively evaluate the teaching skills of clinician-educators. Further research on the OSTE in Japan is warranted.
