# Development and psychometric evaluation of a 360-degree evaluation instrument to assess medical students’ performance in clinical settings at the emergency medicine department in Iran: a methodological study

## TL;DR

This study created and tested a 360-degree evaluation tool to assess medical students' performance in emergency settings in Iran.

## Contribution

The study introduces a new 360-degree evaluation instrument specifically designed for prehospital medical students in Iran.

## Key findings

- The instrument has 55 items across six domains and demonstrated strong validity and reliability.
- Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed the tool's psychometric properties.
- The instrument explained 60.1% of the variance and showed high internal consistency (α=0.98).

## Abstract

In the Iranian context, no 360-degree evaluation tool has been developed to assess the performance of prehospital medical emergency students in clinical settings. This article describes the development of a 360-degree evaluation tool and presents its first psychometric evaluation.

There were 2 steps in this study: step 1 involved developing the instrument (i.e., generating the items) and step 2 constituted the psychometric evaluation of the instrument. We performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and also evaluated the instrument’s face, content, and convergent validity and reliability.

The instrument contains 55 items across 6 domains, including leadership, management, and teamwork (19 items), consciousness and responsiveness (14 items), clinical and interpersonal communication skills (8 items), integrity (7 items), knowledge and accountability (4 items), and loyalty and transparency (3 items). The instrument was confirmed to be a valid measure, as the 6 domains had eigenvalues over Kaiser’s criterion of 1 and in combination explained 60.1% of the variance (Bartlett’s test of sphericity [1,485]=19,867.99, P<0.01). Furthermore, this study provided evidence for the instrument’s convergent validity and internal consistency (α=0.98), suggesting its suitability for assessing student performance.

We found good evidence for the validity and reliability of the instrument. Our instrument can be used to make future evaluations of student performance in the clinical setting more structured, transparent, informative, and comparable.