A pilot study to test the effectiveness of an innovative interprofessional education assessment strategy.

The goals of this quasi-experimental pilot study were to test an assessment tool designed to evaluate students' teamwork skills, and to assess the effectiveness of an interprofessional education (IPE) course. Participants were health professional students (physical therapy, pharmacy, dental and osteopathic medicine), 24 of whom were second-year students who had previously taken part in an IPE course (experimental group), and 22 of whom were third years that had not (control group). Students interacted with a standardized patient and her son during an asynchronous Team Objective Structured Clinical Exam (TOSCE), after which they were scored on their teamwork skills using newly designed teamwork rating scales. Cronbach Alpha calculations suggest that the rating scales are reliable when rater scores are aggregated (0.81). Pearson coefficient calculations determined that teamwork scores of live raters and video raters were significantly correlated (p < 0.0001) suggesting good consistency across these raters, and the experimental group performed significantly better (p = 0.0003) than the control group suggesting that the IPE curriculum is successfully equipping students with teamwork skills. The results of this study contribute to the much needed IPE assessment literature, and suggest that teamwork skills can be taught and effectively assessed using this new rating scale.