Hofmeister Erik H, Diehl Kathryn A, Creevy Kate E, Pashmakova Medora, Woolcock Andrew, Lyon Shane
Department of Surgery, College of Veterinary Medicine, Midwestern University, 19555 North 59th Avenue, Glendale, AZ 85308 USA. Email:
Department of Small Animal Medicine and Surgery, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602 USA.
J Vet Med Educ. 2019 Spring;46(1):28-34. doi: 10.3138/jvme.0617-071r. Epub 2018 Oct 4.
The primary purpose of this study was to identify themes that are consistent across veterinary internship applicants' personal statements and that are correlated with the statements' perceived overall quality. A secondary purpose was to investigate the reliability in personal statement quality scoring among six experienced internship candidate evaluators. One hundred applications to the University of Georgia Small Animal Rotating Internship program were evaluated. Each evaluator wrote a description of what he or she values in personal statements and his or her beliefs about content and presentation in high- and low-quality statements. After statement de-identification, each evaluator reviewed 15 randomly selected personal statements from internship applicants and assigned each a score ranging from 1 to 4 according to the following criteria: 1 = would not rank for an internship; 2 = would rank in the bottom third; 3 = would rank in the middle third; and 4 = would rank in the top third. A subset of these scored personal statements was chosen for qualitative analysis. A qualitative document analysis using grounded theory was performed for both the evaluators' descriptions of preferences in personal statements and the subset of personal statements. Agreement among evaluators' assigned scores was slight (Fleiss's κ = 0.11). Analysis of the evaluator statements and the scored candidate statements indicated that important factors in a personal statement include the applicant's ability to articulate experiences, to convey maturity, to demonstrate understanding of what an internship entails, and to describe reasons for pursuing an internship.
本研究的主要目的是确定兽医实习申请人个人陈述中一致的主题，并确定这些主题与陈述的整体质量之间的相关性。次要目的是调查六位经验丰富的实习候选人评估者对个人陈述质量评分的可靠性。对佐治亚大学小动物轮转实习项目的100份申请进行了评估。每位评估者都写了一份关于他或她在个人陈述中看重什么的描述，以及他或她对高质量和低质量陈述的内容及呈现方式的看法。在对陈述进行去识别处理后，每位评估者审阅了15份从实习申请人中随机抽取的个人陈述，并根据以下标准为每份陈述分配1至4分：1 = 不会被列为实习候选人；2 = 会排在后三分之一；3 = 会排在中间三分之一；4 = 会排在前三分之一。从这些有评分的个人陈述中选取了一个子集进行定性分析。对评估者关于个人陈述偏好的描述以及个人陈述子集都进行了基于扎根理论的定性文档分析。评估者评分之间的一致性很弱（Fleiss's κ = 0.11）。对评估者陈述和有评分的候选人陈述的分析表明，个人陈述中的重要因素包括申请人清晰表达经历的能力、展现成熟度的能力、表明对实习内容理解的能力以及描述申请实习原因的能力。
