Questionnaire Design and Responsiveness in a Data Capture Tool for Student Sharing of Experiences of Statewide Clerkship Sites

Abstract

Positive clerkship experiences and student performance in the clinical years has been correlated to perceived quality of education and specialty choice amongst medical students [1-3]. The Medical College of Georgia uses a distributed campus model with more than 250 clerkship rotation sites across the state and beyond, making student clerkship choices imperative to their development as physicians. We developed a survey to collect both quantitative and qualitative data from students during their clerkship years and a system to distribute that information to students. The data allowed us to evaluate the effectiveness of various question formats through responsiveness, the length of responses, and time spent on the survey. In addition to this, we looked at the number of responses per clerkship in order to see whether or not our survey was getting information about all of the 3rd year rotations. We aspire to take these findings and utilize them to expand t he program and improve the questionnaire in order to yield more responsiveness from students.