Psychometric properties of the Persian version of System for Evaluation of Teaching Qualities by students: A tool for assessing clinical tutors from students’ viewpoint

BACKGROUND: Effective clinical teaching is crucially important for patient care in future. Therefore, proper clinical training is essential to make physicians capable of delivering high-quality health care. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The present study was a cross-sectional research. After translating the questionnaire into Persian, it was distributed among medical students in the clinical years of medical education in teaching hospitals affiliated to Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences in 2018. The System for Evaluation of Teaching Qualities (SETQ) has 25 questions in a 6-scale Likert scale that evaluates clinical tutors in five dimensions of teaching and learning environment, professional attitude toward students, transferring of goals, evaluation of students, feedback, and promoting self-directed learning. Instrument reliability was assessed by calculating the Cronbach's alpha coefficient, whereas questionnaire content validity was evaluated by relative content validity ratio (CVR) and content validity index (CVI). To evaluate the structural validity, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted. RESULTS: The SETQ was completed by 127 medical students. Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the total questionnaire was estimated as 0.908. The factor analysis showed that the questionnaire was composed of six factors, explaining 66.14% of the total variance. The CVI and CVR indices of the individual items were also acceptable. CONCLUSION: The findings of our study showed that the Persian version of SETQ questionnaire had the acceptable reliability and validity to be used in assessing clinical tutors in different hospitals in Iran.