Education in Doctor of Medicine programs has moved towards an emphasis on clinical competency, with entrustable professional activities providing a framework of learning objectives and outcomes to be assessed within the clinical environment. While the identification and structured definition of objectives and outcomes have evolved, many methods…

Quantitative measures of systematic differences in OSCE scoring across examiners (often termed examiner stringency) can threaten the validity of examination outcomes. Such effects are usually conceptualised and operationalised based solely on checklist/domain scores in a station, and global grades are not often used in this type of analysis. In…

Students are often encouraged to learn 'deeply' by abstracting generalizable principles from course content rather than memorizing details. So widespread is this perspective that Likert-style inventories are now routinely administered to students to quantify how much a given course or curriculum evokes deep learning. The predictive validity of…

The learning environment (LE) includes social interactions, organizational culture, structures, and physical and virtual spaces that influence the learning experiences of students. Despite numerous studies exploring the perception of healthcare professional students (HCPS) of their LE, the validity evidence of the utilized questionnaires remains…

The Ottawa Surgical Competency Operating Room Evaluation (OSCORE) is an assessment tool that has gained prominence in postgraduate competency-based training programs. We undertook a systematic review and narrative synthesis to articulate the underlying validity argument in support of this tool. Although originally developed to assess readiness for…

The present study explores two rating methods for peer assessment (analytical rating using criteria and comparative judgement) in light of concurrent validity, reliability and insufficient diagnosticity (i.e. the degree to which substandard work is recognised by the peer raters). During a second-year undergraduate course, students wrote a one-page…

A central principle of programmatic assessment is that the final decision is not a surprise to the learner. To achieve this, assessments must demonstrate predictive and consequential validity, however, to date, research has only focussed on the former. The present study attempts to address this gap by examining the predictive and consequential…

Prior work experience in a relevant medical profession is an important admission criterion currently used at many German medical schools in addition to cognitive criteria. In other countries, work experience is often considered in later admission stages (e.g., interviews with pre-selected subgroups of applicants). However, evidence for its…

Although there is extensive evidence confirming the predictive validity of situational judgement tests (SJTs) in medical education, there remains a shortage of evidence for their predictive validity for performance of postgraduate trainees in their first role in clinical practice. Moreover, to date few researchers have empirically examined the…

Aptitude tests are widely used in selection. However, despite certain advantages their use remains controversial. This paper aims to critically appraise five sources of evidence for the construct validity of the Health Professions Admission Test (HPAT)-Ireland, an aptitude test used for selecting undergraduate medical students. The objectives are…

Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) have become ubiquitous as a form of assessment in medical education but involve substantial resource demands and considerable local variation. A detailed understanding of the processes by which OSCEs are designed and administered could improve feasibility and sustainability. This exploration of…

Although problem-based learning (PBL) has been widely used in medical schools, few studies have attended to the assessment of PBL processes using validated instruments. This study examined reliability and validity for an instrument assessing PBL performance in four domains: Problem Solving, Use of Information, Group Process, and Professionalism.…

Medical school selection is currently in the paradoxical situation in which selection tools may predict study outcomes, but which constructs are actually doing the predicting is unknown (the 'black box of selection'). Therefore, our research focused on those constructs, answering the question: do the internal structures of the tests in an…

Measurement invariance is a prerequisite for comparing measurement scores from different groups. In medical education, multi-source feedback (MSF) is utilized to assess core competencies, including the professionalism. However, little attention has been paid to the measurement invariance of assessment instruments; that is, whether an instrument…

Typically, only a minority of applicants to health professional training are invited to interview. However, pre-interview measures of cognitive skills predict for national licensure scores (Gauer et al. in "Med Educ Online" 21 2016) and subsequently licensure scores predict for performance in practice (Tamblyn et al. in "JAMA"…