PURPOSE: Students in many medical schools now undergo multiple standardized-patient-based assessments. In this study, the authors examine the ability of such serial assessments to detect interval learning. METHOD: Twenty-one students from the University of California, Irvine, College of Medicine, class of 1999, underwent a clinical skills appraisal after three months of their third-year instruction. After nine months, all 89 members of that class completed an OSCE. Subsequently, all 87 students in the class of 2000 also completed clinical skills assessments after their third and ninth months of third-year instruction. All of these exercises included identical or similar stations measuring history, physical examination, and communication skills. Communication skills were measured somewhat differently during some of the exercises, using checklists that were either "content-" or "process-"oriented. The authors compared the performances for all groups. RESULTS: Both classes demonstrated significant improvement in physical examination performance, while their history performances remained unchanged. According to the assessments, their communication skills deteriorated over the course of their third-year instruction. Repeated exposures to similar or identical cases on the serial assessments did not impact the students' performances. Both content- and process-oriented measures of communication skills yielded highly similar results. CONCLUSIONS: Serial assessments using standardized patients can detect interval changes in performance that are independent of repeated exposures to similar or identical cases. Changes detected using this approach may have important curricular implications.
PURPOSE: Students in many medical schools now undergo multiple standardized-patient-based assessments. In this study, the authors examine the ability of such serial assessments to detect interval learning. METHOD: Twenty-one students from the University of California, Irvine, College of Medicine, class of 1999, underwent a clinical skills appraisal after three months of their third-year instruction. After nine months, all 89 members of that class completed an OSCE. Subsequently, all 87 students in the class of 2000 also completed clinical skills assessments after their third and ninth months of third-year instruction. All of these exercises included identical or similar stations measuring history, physical examination, and communication skills. Communication skills were measured somewhat differently during some of the exercises, using checklists that were either "content-" or "process-"oriented. The authors compared the performances for all groups. RESULTS: Both classes demonstrated significant improvement in physical examination performance, while their history performances remained unchanged. According to the assessments, their communication skills deteriorated over the course of their third-year instruction. Repeated exposures to similar or identical cases on the serial assessments did not impact the students' performances. Both content- and process-oriented measures of communication skills yielded highly similar results. CONCLUSIONS: Serial assessments using standardized patients can detect interval changes in performance that are independent of repeated exposures to similar or identical cases. Changes detected using this approach may have important curricular implications.
Authors: Duncan Smith-Rohrberg Maru; Jason Andrews; Dan Schwarz; Ryan Schwarz; Bibhav Acharya; Astha Ramaiya; Gregory Karelas; Ruma Rajbhandari; Kedar Mate; Sona Shilpakar Journal: Global Health Date: 2012-11-30 Impact factor: 4.185