Standard 4: Faculty Preparation, Productivity, Participation, and Policies
The faculty members of a medical school are qualified through their education, training, experience, and continuing professional development and provide the leadership and support necessary to attain the institution's educational, research, and service goals.
Element 4.5: Faculty Professional Development
A medical school and/or its sponsoring institution provides opportunities for professional development to each faculty member in the areas of discipline content, curricular design, program evaluation, student assessment methods, instructional methodology, and research to enhance his or her skills and leadership abilities in these areas.
Standard 9: Teaching, Supervision, Assessment, and Student and Patient Safety
A medical school ensures that its medical education program includes a comprehensive, fair, and uniform system of formative and summative medical student assessment and protects medical students’ and patients’ safety by ensuring that all persons who teach, supervise, and/or assess medical students are adequately prepared for those responsibilities.
Element 9.1: Preparation of Resident and Non-Faculty Instructors
In a medical school, residents, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and other non-faculty instructors in the medical education program who supervise or teach medical students are familiar with the learning objectives of the course or clerkship and are prepared for their roles in teaching and assessment. The medical school provides resources to enhance residents’ and non-faculty instructors’ teaching and assessment skills and provides central monitoring of their participation in those opportunities.
Element 9.3: Clinical Supervision of Medical Students
A medical school ensures that medical students in clinical learning situations involving patient care are appropriately supervised at all times in order to ensure patient and student safety, that the level of responsibility delegated to the student is appropriate to the student’s level of training, and that the activities supervised are within the scope of practice of the supervising health professional.
Element 9.5: Narrative Assessment
A medical school ensures that a narrative description of a medical student’s performance, including non-cognitive achievement, is included as a component of the assessment in each required course and clerkship of the medical education program whenever teacher-student interaction permits this form of assessment.
Element 9.6: Setting Standards of Achievement
A medical school ensures that faculty members with appropriate knowledge and expertise set standards of achievement in each required learning experience in the medical education program.
Element 9.7: Formative Assessment and Feedback
The medical school’s curricular governance committee ensures that each medical student is assessed and provided with formal formative feedback early enough during each required course or clerkship to allow sufficient time for remediation. Formal feedback occurs at least at the midpoint of the course or clerkship. A course or clerkship less than four weeks in length provides alternate means by which medical students can measure their progress in learning.
LCME Glossary|Formative Feedback
Formative feedback: Information communicated to a medical student in a timely manner that is intended to modify the student’s thinking or behavior in order to improve subsequent learning and performance in the medical curriculum. (Element 9.7)
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