Abstract:

Background and objectives:
The Francisco de Vitoria School of Medicine, through its Medical Education Unit, began a process of exploring actions, processes and beliefs that can influence the educational performance and learning of students, in order to design actions for improving. Thus, different interventions were planned (curricular evaluations, student evaluations, improvement plans, analysis of student work,...), among which the identification of the level of Internal Coherence (IC) of the School stands out. This indicator aims to assess the ability of an educational center to engage in deliberate improvements for teaching and learning. Its conceptual framework is based on evidence about the types of practices, processes and conditions that lead to increasing the quality of that teaching and learning and is a guide for its leaders to develop improvement plans (Forman et al 2018; SERP Strategic Education Research Partnership, 2003). The process of identifying IC is to explore its conditioning factors, and offer solid evidence about the process of improving the education offered by the School. The IC Assessment Protocol uses two tools: The Internal Coherence Scale (ICS) and The Internal Coherence Development Rubric. This study describes the application process of the ICS and its results.

Methodology:
A validation process of the ICS in Spanish was carried out first, this included the following steps: Translation & cultural adaptation involving two statisticians, one linguist , a clinician an educator and a translator. Study of intra-observer reliability (test-retest in two months) and finally application of the scale to all full-time professors at the School of Medicine (25). The scale is composed with 11 factors (each factor includes items with the same underlying idea) and a total of 52 items, the response graded from 0 to 6 (highly inn/accurate).

Results:
Show average scores by factors of the IC profile. We distinguish three levels of scoring: high, medium & low
High level:
(F2) Psychological safety (4.91); with high homogeneity between items (HBI);
(F1) Leadership for learning (4.81); HBI
(F11) Individual efficacy (4.77); HBI
(F6) Collective efficacy (4.63); HBI
Medium level:
(F10) Team processes (4.54); HBI
(F9) Support for Teams (4.46); HBI
(F5) Teacher’s involvement in instructional decisions (4.23); HBI
Low level:
(F3) Professional development (4.19), with significant differences between items (DHBI);
(F4) Collaboration around an improvement strategy (4.05); HBI
(F7-8) Team’s shared understanding for effective practices (3.41); DHBI

Conclusions:
This first approach to IC shows that areas of leadership, educational environment among teachers and their effectiveness, both collectively and individually, are high, which is a good "breeding ground" for addressing educational improvements at school. Clearly areas such as collaboration of teachers around areas of improvement in which the School may be interested, teachers participation in teaching decisions of the school and perhaps of their own subjects, as well as their perception in terms of professional development should be considered as areas for improvement. The study identifies a series of important and specific points to discuss and to act directly.

Acknowledgements:
To the professors participants in the study.

Keywords:

Medical education, learning, teaching, questionnaire, reliability, educational quality, leadership, team, educational environment.