Background

In medical education, clinical supervision has a crucial impact on medical students’ learning in clinical rotations (1,2). The development of supervisory practices that make a difference to the quality of students’ learning requires assessment of the quality of supervision and systematic feedback to clinical supervisors. The Maastricht Clinical Teaching Questionnaire, (MCTQ), has been found to be a valid and reliable theory based instrument for evaluating individual clinical supervisors' performance at the workplace. (3) It has been used in several countries for providing feedback to clinical supervisors on how they supervise students in clinical practice (4). The theoretical framework of the instrument is the cognitive apprenticeship model, a meta-cognitive approach to students’ learning, advocating principles for teaching and making explicit the often tacit processes involved in experts’ handling of complex cognitive tasks (5). The questionnaire has been translated to Swedish and used in faculty development activities for clinical teachers and supervisors across educational levels. The purpose is to stimulate feedback exchange and dialogue between students and supervisors on supervision strategies and learning. In combination with a self-assessment form the instrument is currently being used in an action research study at Lund and Malmö University hospitals. In short, the aim is to study the process and effects of workplace based education involving groups of clinical supervisors in action research projects.  The aim of the present study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Swedish version.

Method

The MCTQ-instrument was translated from English to Swedish and back-translated by a professional translator. Discrepancies was discussed and adjusted for and a final version was compared with the original Dutch instrument. To further determine the clarity and intelligibility of items we used student focus-group discussions which resulted in minor corrections of wordings. As suggested in previous psychometric evaluations we added a question on whether the supervisor was considered better than average, average or below and a question on whether the supervisor was a resident, specialist,  “other”  or “do not know”.    The final version was distributed in a pilot-study including 77 students followed by a major study including 465 students (response rate 76%). The students were asked to fill in the questionnaire thinking of one supervisor they currently were working with but without naming the supervisor.

Results 

The instrument is currently being tested for construct validity and reliability through analyses of item response rate, floor and ceiling effect, corrected item-total correlations, factor structure and tests for internal consistency.  Analyses of the pilot support construct validity and reliability.  Final results of the major study will be presented.