Effect of student-directed solicitation of evaluation forms on the timeliness of completion by preceptors in the United States

PURPOSE: Summative evaluation forms assessing a student’s clinical performance are often completed by a faculty preceptor at the end of a clinical training experience. At our institution, despite the use of an electronic system, timeliness of completion has been suboptimal, potentially limiting our ability to monitor students’ progress. The aim of the present study was to determine whether a student-directed approach to summative evaluation form collection at the end of a pediatrics clerkship would enhance timeliness of completion for third-year medical students. METHODS: This was a pre- and post-intervention educational quality improvement project focused on 156 (82 pre-intervention, 74 post-intervention) third-year medical students at Penn State College of Medicine completing their 4-week pediatric clerkship. Utilizing REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) informatics support, student-directed evaluation form solicitation was encouraged. The Wilcoxon rank-sum test was applied to compare the pre-intervention (May 1, 2017 to March 2, 2018) and post-intervention (April 2, 2018 to December 21, 2018) percentages of forms completed before the rotation midpoint. RESULTS: In total, 740 evaluation forms were submitted during the pre-intervention phase and 517 during the post-intervention phase. The percentage of forms completed before the rotation midpoint increased after implementing student-directed solicitation (9.6% vs. 39.7%, P<0.05). CONCLUSION: Our clerkship relies on subjective summative evaluations to track students’ progress, deploy improvement strategies, and determine criteria for advancement; however, our preceptors struggled with timely submission. Allowing students to direct the solicitation of evaluation forms enhanced the timeliness of completion and should be considered in clerkships facing similar challenges.