Endocrine Abstracts

Endocrinologists are ideal teachers of physiology and biochemistry, major aspects of the underpinning of the science behind clinical practice. There are many methods that are successful in imparting this core knowledge to our medical students. Patients with endocrine disease also display symptoms and signs that that give clues to diagnoses, and the subject is ideal to serve as a broad general medical education.

Evidence that teachers are effective comes from exam performance, although student feedback is becoming increasingly important to the good teacher. Boehler et al. have demonstrated that feedback does not correlate with knowledge. Students were randomised to receive either constructive feedback on their performance, or just compliments, on their ability to tie surgical knots. Unsurprisingly, the group that were given constructive feedback improved their ability to tie knots significantly (performance score improved from 15.87 to 21.98 on knot tying) compared to the group who got only compliments (whose performance score went from 15.39 to 17.00). However when the students were asked to give feedback on their experience (as they are in the NSS), the group who were given praise (and hence did not really learn) were significantly more satisfied with their teaching (score 6.00) than those who had improved through feedback (satisfaction score 5.00); P=0.005.

Student satisfaction is not an accurate measure of the quality of feedback. It appears that satisfaction ratings respond to praise more than feedback, while learning is more a function of feedback.

Impact factors and the Research Assessment exercise mitigate against good educational research, which is published in journals of low impact. The result of this is that universities tend to give educational research a low priority. Publishing ones educational research in specialist endocrine or other journals is one way of integrating teaching, clinical practice and research.