Internists are required to perform a number of procedures that require mastery of technical and non-technical skills, however, formal assessment of these skills is often lacking. The purpose of this study was to develop, implement, and gather validity evidence for a procedural skills objective structured clinical examination (PS-OSCE) for internal…

Medical education relies heavily on assessment formats that require raters to assess the competence and skills of learners. Unfortunately, there are often inconsistencies and variability in the scores raters assign. To ensure the scores from these assessment tools have validity, it is important to understand the underlying cognitive processes that…

In the domain of self-assessment, researchers have begun to draw distinctions between summative self-assessment activities (i.e., making an overall judgment of one's ability in a particular domain) and self-monitoring processes (i.e., an "in the moment" awareness of whether one has the necessary knowledge or skills to address a specific problem…

Oral examinations have become more standardized over recent years. Traditionally a small number of raters were used for this type of examination. Past studies suggested that more raters should improve reliability. We compared the results of a multi-station structured oral examination using two different rater models, those based in a station,…

Reusing questions on an examination is a concern because test administrators do not want to unfairly aid examinees by exposing them to questions they have seen on previous examinations. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect that prior exposure of questions has on the performance of repeat examinees. Two recent administrations of…

When setting standards, administrators of small-scale OSCEs often face several challenges, including a lack of resources, a lack of available expertise in statistics, and difficulty in recruiting judges. The Modified Borderline-Group Method is a standard setting procedure that compensates for these challenges by using physician examiners and is…