Evaluation of Faculty Development Programs in Medical Education: A Review Study

Considering the increasing importance of examining the effectiveness of faculty development programs in medical universities, the current study aimed to review various aspects of evaluation of the faculty development programs in medical education.

This review study was conducted by searching the databases of Google Scholar, Medline, Eric, Scopus, Ovid, Science Direct, Medical Education, Medical teacher, PubMed, BMC, SAGE, and Magiran using the keywords staff training/development, in-service training, medical faculty, faculty training/ development, and program evaluation and their combinations. The aspects of faculty development programs evaluation were then reviewed.

A total of 62 articles were found of which 29 were selected for review. The aspects of development program evaluations were classified into four categories: theoretical evaluation model, evaluation data collection method, source of evaluation data, and evaluation findings. Most of the studies conducted to evaluate development programs followed Kirk Patrick’s model. Questionnaire was the most common data collection tool. The sources of the data were mostly program attendants (faculty members), and evaluation results indicated the faculty’s high satisfaction with the development programs.

The results suggest that development program evaluations should utilize mixed evaluation methods and that the changes resulted from faculty development programs and the extent of using learned materials should be evaluated at the organizational level and workplace respectively.