Creation and Validation of the Multi-Stakeholder Survey of Learning Environments (MSSLE) for Medical Schools

Instruments have been designed to measure medical students’ perspectives of various aspects of the learning environment (Roff, 2005; Rusticus, Worthington, Wilson, & Joughin, 2014) and to measure junior faculty perspectives (Roff, Mcaleer, & Skinner, 2005). However, there is not currently a validated instrument that measures these attributes across various stakeholder groups. The accrediting body for medical schools in the United States, LCME (March 2018), requires that the medical school learning environment promote appropriate professional behaviors for not only medical students, but for faculty and staff as well. This clarifies the need to assess the learning environment for medical students, faculty, and staff. While previous studies focused primarily on the perspectives of medical students, faculty and staff are also consumers of the learning environment. It is imperative that we ensure equitable environments among these constituency groups (Philibert, Elsey, Fleming, & Razack, 2019) and ongoing assessment should be part of an institution’s best practices (Soemantri, Herrera, & Riquelme, 2010). This quantitative research study is aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of the learning environment of medical schools, across a holistic group of constituents. First, a 27-item Likert scale instrument was formulated and assessed by an expert panel to establish evidence of content validity. Data were collected utilizing the Qualtrics survey software program from medical students, faculty, and staff at a public medical school in the southcentral region of the United States. Psychometric analyses of the data included a review of individual item descriptive statistics, as well as an examination of the vi instrument’s validity using factor analysis procedures. Results indicated that a parsimonious, two-factor model measuring: i) the general learning environment and ii) knowledge of policies and procedures showed evidence of being valid and reliable for measuring concurrent, multi-stakeholder perceptions of the learning environment at the medical school.