Evaluating to maximise clinical placement effectiveness across language and cultural boundaries. The EMANCIPATE consortium

Background: Various instruments are used to evaluate the quality of clinical placements, including the
mixed-methods Manchester Clinical Placement Index (MCPI) for which strong validity evidence exists in the UK. Published research has concentrated primarily on the reliability and/or generalisability of instruments. Evaluation, however, is only of value in so far as it helps enhance students learning environments; there is a dearth of evidence about this (the consequential validity of instruments). The dual aims of the EMANCIPATE consortium are to: 1) explore the potential utility of MCPI in a wider range of sociocultural contexts; 2) to close the loop between evaluating learning environments and enhancing students education.

Summary of Work: University College Cork (Ireland) and Stellenbosch University (South Africa) have used
MCPI in the original English language version. Semmelweis University (Hungary) and Atma Jaya Catholic
University (Indonesia) have translated MCPI into Hungarian and Bahasa Indonesia respectively and
confirmed the fidelity of back-translated versions. We performed confirmatory factor analysis on
responses from 3602 students in the four sites. We are developing an analytical framework, which allows
free text responses to be first analysed in the local language and then aggregated at consortium level.

Summary of Results: A comparative fit index (CFI) ≥ .95 across the dataset as a whole and in each of the evaluation contexts confirms the two-factor structure of MCPI. A pilot evaluation of the qualitative analytic framework has provided evidence of sufficiency from just 40 responses.

Discussion and Conclusions: These findings extend earlier evidence that MCPI, an 8-item mixed
quantitative and qualitative instrument, is a parsimonious and informative evaluation instrument by
showing that it is reliable across implementation contexts and languages.
Take-home Messages: This research supports the value of MCPI, not just for the evaluation of learning
environments, but for cross-cultural collaboration in improving students learning experiences.