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| Survey design, collection, analysis, and reporting enable the School’s leaders to “make smarter decisions, solve problems, and improve outcomes.” |
For statisticians Clint Hosford and Kurt Zhang, there’s nothing casual about “how’s it going?”
Hosford, who works for the School’s Office of Medical Education, and Zhang, a bioinformatics expert and biostatistician in the Department of Pathology, focus their professional expertise on accurate answers to that question.
Hosford works with data mostly derived from surveys of students and teachers and student data such as test scores. Once he’s satisfied with the analytical results of a particular questionnaire or survey, he reports to the people who decide about the content and delivery of courses taken by the future physicians enrolled at the SMHS.
“This job is first about collecting a lot of data—from students, from teachers,” said Hosford, a graduate of UND’s PhD program in research methodologies. It’s painstaking work, and people like Hosford, with the intense preparation required for the numbers-oriented PhD he has, are the ones who do it.
From all of that data flow, Hosford produces reports for the School’s leadership so that they can tweak—or revamp—medical education programs as needed to keep UND at the peak of its educational form.
“Primarily, what I do is geared to program evaluation, which is different from academic assessment. This means that I collect a lot of data related to our medical education program,” said Hosford, who spent nearly 10 years as a practicing physical therapist at a hospital in Williston, N.Dak.
Designing the survey is just as important as collecting results.
“I design surveys so that they accurately measure what medical students are thinking about the courses they take during their four-year program of study at the UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences,” Hosford said. “I’m responsible for collecting, analyzing, and reporting these data; the reports give various stakeholders insight into how things are going for UND medical students. We get a lot of this feedback from students through surveys and questionnaires.”
Of key importance are the evaluations of lecturers—especially first-time lecturers—and facilitators for PCL (patient-centered learning) groups.
“In all of this—whether we’re doing formative or summative evaluations—we’re looking for feedback from students, and at the same time, we get performance data that tell us how students are doing,” said Hosford, who, in addition to his analytical duties also teaches graduate statistics courses. “We all want to know that what they are learning is what we think we’re teaching them. We’re always interested in improving our performance in this area without disrupting the flow for our students.”
The difference between formative and summative evaluations (or assessments) boils down to an analogy written by Robert Stake, a nationally known University of Illinois expert on education evaluation: “When the cook tastes the soup, that’s formative; when the guests taste the soup, that’s summative.”
Hosford earned his PhD at the UND College of Education and Human Development in research methodologies with an emphasis in statistics.
Today’s statistician, he notes, does a lot more online.
“In fact, I worked with software developer Eric Walters in the School’s Information Resources Department to develop a proprietary Web-based survey tool that streamlines the data-collection process,” Hosford said. “We get a lot of information about our medical program direct from students keystroking answers to surveys. This software automates a lot of the survey work—students and teachers both use the same system to fill out our surveys.
It’s automated and even does the analysis so that we can produce reports more efficiently.”
No matter how the data are gathered, analyzed, and reported, the results are routinely compared year to year, across campuses, to accreditation standards, or national trends.
“Thus not only are we looking at what we do internally, comparisons help us figure out where we stand nationally, and we can use the results to make smarter decisions, solve problems, and improve outcomes,” said Hosford, who describes himself as an applied, as opposed to a theoretical, statistician.
“What I do is work on a statistical window into what we do,” Hosford said. “It’s all about constantly
evaluating and improving the education of future physicians.”
