Learning environments in medical education

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Response by Sue Roff

I am sorry Dr Stewart was piqued by my opinion that instruments developed in the 1970s were likely to be out of date for measuring the medical school educational environment 35 years later. It is interesting to note that neither the Learning Environment Questionnaire nor the Medical School Learning Environment Survey was reported in Medline between 1981 and 1997, when we published the first report on the Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure. It is good to see a resurgence of interest in the educational environment, which will of course always be a broad church. Dr Stewart's work (Stewart & Frye, 2004) on the influence of negative items is also interesting and it might be worth investigating this point with DREEM, although we note that he and his colleague concluded that the MSLES was not compromised by its following of the ‘common wisdom’ on this point.

Correspondence: Sue Roff, Centre for Medical Education, Dundee University Medical School, 484 Perth Road, Dundee DD2 1LR, Scotland, UK. Email: [email protected]