Faculty Assessments in a Military Medical Field Practicum: Rater Experience and Gender Do Not Appear to Influence Scoring

Abstract

Introduction: Any implicit and explicit biases that exist may alter our interpretation of people and events. Within the context of assessment, it is important to determine if biases exist and to decrease any existing biases, especially when rating student performance to provide meaningful, fair, and useful input. The purpose of this study was to determine if the experience and gender of faculty members contribute to their ratings of students in a military medical field practicum. This information is important for fair ratings of students. Three research questions were addressed: Were there differences between new versus experienced faculty raters? Were there differences in assessments provided by female and male faculty members? Did gender of faculty raters impact ratings of female and male students?.

Materials and methods: This study examined trained faculty evaluators' ratings of three cohorts of medical students during 2015-2017 during a medical field practicum. Female (n = 80) and male (n = 161) faculty and female (n = 158) and male (n = 311) students were included. Within this dataset, there were 469 students and 241 faculty resulting in 5,599 ratings for each of six outcome variables that relate to overall leader performance, leader competence, and leader communication. Descriptive statistics were computed for all variables for the first four observations of each student. Descriptive analyses were performed for evaluator experience status and gender differences by each of the six variables. A multivariate analyses of variance was performed to examine whether there were differences between gender of faculty and gender of students.

Results: Descriptive analyses of the experience status of faculty revealed no significant differences between means on any of the rating elements. Descriptive analyses of faculty gender revealed no significant differences between female and male faculty ratings of the students. The overall MANOVA analyses found no statistically significant difference between female and male students on the combined dependent variables of leader performance for any of the four observations.

Conclusions: The study revealed that there were no differences in ratings of student leader performance based on faculty experience. In addition, there were no differences in ratings of student leader performance based on faculty gender.