Purpose: Our US medical school uses National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) tests as progress tests during the pre-clerkship curriculum to assess students. In this study, we examined students' growth patterns using progress tests in the first year of medical school to identify students at risk for failing United States Medical Licensing…

Assessment of learners in the anatomical sciences is a complex task as it not only tests students' fact knowledge, but also the analysis of visual information. Sometimes, novice histology learners must acquire image recognition skills of microscopic structures in a short time frame. This paper describes a strategy of offering first year dental…

The phenomenon of first impression is well researched in social psychology, but less so in the study of OSCEs and the multiple mini interview (MMI). To explore its bearing on the MMI method we included a rating of first impression in the MMI for student selection executed 2012 at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany (196…

Many aspects of higher education must be reconceptualised for massive open online courses (MOOCs). Formative and summative assessment of qualitative work in particular requires novel approaches to cope with the numbers involved. Peer review has been proposed as one solution, and has been widely adopted by major MOOC providers, but there is…

The Objective Structured Clinical Exam (OSCE) is a widely used method of assessment in medical education. Rater cognition has become an important area of inquiry in the medical education assessment literature generally, and in the OSCE literature specifically, because of concerns about potential compromises of validity. In this study, a novel…

As online courses become more common, practitioners are in need of clear guidance on how to translate best educational practices into web-based instruction. Moreover, student engagement is a pressing concern in online courses, which often have high levels of dropout. Our goals in this work were to experimentally study routine instructional design…

The rapid pace of scientific discovery has catalyzed the need for medical students to be able to find and assess new information. The knowledge required for physicians' skillful practice will change of the course of their careers, and, to keep up, they must be able to recognized their deficiencies, search for new knowledge, and critically evaluate…

The relationships between medical school academic achievement and first year residency performance were investigated for the 1983 and 1984 graduates of the Medical College of Wisconsin. The analyses were designed to control for suspected differential resident expectations among the directors of various medical specialties, and were replicated to…

A study compared the performance of 232 Brown University (Rhode Island) medical graduates on senior-year examinations in clinical skills examinations and during residencies, as evaluated by their residency directors. Results indicated a strong correlation between the two evaluations, suggesting that the performance-based undergraduate assessments,…

Students admitted to medical school after three and four years of college were compared on seven admission variables and three measures of medical school performance. The two groups differed significantly on three admission variables but could not be distinguished on the basis of measures of medical school performance. (SW)

A study of medical student performance showed the clinical performance factor more or less unpredictable from aptitude and premedical academic achievement indices while the academic performance factor was forecast with acceptable accuracy by equations based on the Medical College Admissions Test and premedical grade point average. (JT)

Relationships between the ratings of interns by their supervisors, their peers, and the interns themselves on four dimensions are compared and analyzed in relationship to earlier measures of aptitude, achievement, and personality. Findings reported show supervisor ratings to be highest and admission variables to be unrelated to intern performance.…

A study to assess the value of the dean's letter of recommendation as a predictor of internship performance compared information in dean's letters with the evaluation made by clinical staff during internship and found no significant correlation between the two. (JT)

Multiple regression processes are employed to assess the effect of student age on preclinical medical school achievement in the context of eight other predictor variables. Results indicate that student age fails to contribute to the explanation of preclinical achievement after the influence of the other variables is taken into account. (Author/CM)

An investigation to address the issue of which objective factor would predict performance during the postgraduate year residency and to determine whether the performance of applicants from honors-pass-fail schools was predictable is reported. (MLW)