Although clinical clerkships are an important and essential part of any medical training program, medical schools' policy makers seem to exert little control on the educational effectiveness of clerkships. However, educational quality of clerkships may be assured and improved by using information from evaluation. The success of the usefulness of evaluation results is clearly associated with the fulfilment of a number of conditions: willingness to adopt a critical attitude, willingness to analyse the existing situation, opportunities to discuss and carry on a dialogue, availability of a plan of action and continuous collection of evaluative data. This paper describes these conditions and the way in which they were translated in the context of clinical clerkships.

hdl.handle.net/1765/2679
Medical Teacher
Department of Psychology

Wolfhagen, I., Gijselaers, W., Dolmans, D., Essed, G., & Schmidt, H. (1997). Improving clinical education through evaluation. Medical Teacher, 19(2), 99–103. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1765/2679