BMC Public Health 2007, 7:219 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/7/219 versions. Up to 35 additional questions were customized for each discipline. To ensure anonymity of participants, questions about age, gender, ethnicity, and country of birth were excluded. Throughout the process of instru- ment development, the questions were frequently reviewed and critiqued by NTCC members for clarity and face validity; however, formal instrument development procedures were not employed due to time requirements to complete the baseline survey prior to availability of NTCC-developed educational materials. Survey administration Prior to administration, a master protocol was submitted to and approved by the University of California San Diego Institutional Review Board (IRB). The master protocol and UCSD approval letter were made available to NTCC members via the NTCC website [14] for use in seeking review and approval by their own IRBs. Individual answer sheets were prepared by the UCSD School of Medicine Office of Educational Computing (EdCom) to include unique identifiers that did not identify students by name or student number, but were necessary for computer scor- ing. The limited demographic information and coding scheme were approved by the UCSD IRB as consistent with waiving the requirement for individual signed con- sent. Packets of individualized coded answer sheets were sent to each participating faculty member who was responsible for producing copies of the cover sheet explaining the survey and the survey instrument. Surveys were administered prior to September 15, 2005 to provide a baseline before faculty began using NTCC-developed educational materials. In almost all cases, surveys were administered during classroom sessions where students were together for a course. This approach worked well for the clinical disciplines; however, in the three participating public health programs, students were not all together at the same time. Accordingly, MPH students in these schools were invited to participate in the survey on a vol- Table 1: Student participation in NTCC Survey, 2005 Medicine (MD/DO) Physician Assistant (PA) Nursing (BSN) Advanced Practice Nursing (NP/APN) Pharmacy (PharmD) Respiratory Therapy (RT) Clinical Laboratory Sciences (MT/CLS) Public Health (MPH) Totals 5 2 5 4 3 3 3 3 28 untary basis by individually obtaining a copy of the survey and answer sheet; only 61 students chose to participate in this manner. The majority of respondents were within six or fewer months of completion of their studies. After sur- veys were administered, answer sheets were returned to UCSD EdCom for scoring. Item analyses were provided to each faculty member for students in their own school; item analyses for schools in the same discipline were aggregated and distributed to discipline-group members. Results Data reported in this article are limited primarily to responses to the 18 questions common across all eight versions of the survey administered to students in 28 pro- grams in 20 NTCC schools. Of the 2965 students enrolled in the 28 programs sur- veyed, about half (1480) completed the survey. Table 1 shows student participation by discipline. The smallest proportion of participants was from public health. When those respondents are excluded, almost two-thirds (64.5%) of students in the seven clinically-related disci- plines completed surveys. Almost three-quarters (74%) of respondents were in three disciplines: medicine, phar- macy, and undergraduate nursing. Table 2 presents responses to selected questions. Almost 90% of respondents had attended at least one lecture where TB was a primary focus (NTCC faculty reported common topics were epidemiology, diagnosis, treatment, and other content pertinent to their specific discipline), and over half (56.3%) had attended three or more hours of lecture/instruction on TB. The major teaching modali- ties were lectures and case discussion at conferences or case studies; very few students had participated in other forms of active-learning (i.e., seminars, standardized patients, games, computer simulations, computer mod- ules). 675 120 555 220 503 42 85 765 2965 485 (72) 100 (83) 251 (45) 92 (42) 364 (72) 42 (100) 85 (100) 61 (8)* 1480 (50.0) Discipline Number of Programs Total Students N Respondents N (%) *If public health students are eliminated from totals, overall response proportion for the seven clinically-related disciplines is 64.5% Page 3 of 8 (page number not for citation purposes)