The practice of medicine involves inherent ambiguity, arising from limitations of knowledge, diagnostic problems, complexities of treatment and outcome and unpredictability of patient response. Research into doctors' tolerance of ambiguity is hampered by poor conceptual clarity and inadequate measurement scales. We aimed to create and pilot a…

In medical education, student distress is known to hamper learning and professional development. To address this problem, recent studies aimed at helping students cope with stressful situations. Undergraduate students in clinical practice frequently use experiences of surrounding peers to estimate their abilities to master such challenging…

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…

The multiple mini-interview (MMI) has become an increasingly popular admissions method for selecting prospective students into professional programs (e.g., medical school). The MMI uses a series of short, labour intensive simulation stations and scenario interviews to more effectively assess applicants' non-cognitive qualities such as…

Inventories that measure approaches to learning have revealed that certain approaches are associated with better academic performance. However, these inventories were developed primarily with higher education students on non-vocational courses and recent research shows they fail to capture the full range of healthcare students' intentions and…

The influence of problem-based learning (PBL) and open-book tests on long-term knowledge retention is unclear and subject of discussion. Hypotheses were that PBL as well as open-book tests positively affect long-term knowledge retention. Four progress test results of fifth and sixth-year medical students (n = 1,648) of three medical schools were…

Although the development of collaborative relationships is considered a requirement for medical education, the functioning of these relationships may be impaired by a well-documented social-psychological phenomenon known as group conformity. The authors hypothesized that students would insert a needle into an incorrect location relative to the…

"Curricula-in-action" generally differ from "official" curricula. That is particularly true of clerkship curricula because the practising doctors who supervise medical students' clinical activities are only secondarily educators. Clerkship education is evaluated, however, according to benchmarks set by official curricula.…

Participant attrition may be a significant threat to the generalizability of the results of educational research studies if participants who do not persist in a study differ from those who do in ways that can affect the experimental outcomes. A multi-center trial of the efficacy of different computer-based instructional strategies gave us the…

Until now, positive effects of assessment at a medical curriculum level have not been demonstrated. This study was performed to determine whether an interim assessment, taken during a small group work session of an ongoing biomedical course, results in students' increased performance at the formal course examination. A randomized controlled trial…

Context specificity, or the variation in a participant's performance from one case, or situation, to the next, is a recognized problem in medical education. However, studies have not explored the potential reasons for context specificity in experts using the lens of situated cognition and cognitive load theories (CLT). Using these theories, we…

Examinees who initially fail and later repeat an SP-based clinical skills exam typically exhibit large score gains on their second attempt, suggesting the possibility that examinees were not well measured on one of those attempts. This study evaluates score precision for examinees who repeated an SP-based clinical skills test administered as part…

Medical schools employ a variety of preadmission measures to select students most likely to succeed in the program. The Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) and the undergraduate college grade point average (uGPA) are two academic measures typically used to select students in medical school. The assumption that presently used preadmission…

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…

The drive to quality-manage medical education has created a need for valid measurement instruments. Validity evidence includes the theoretical and contextual origin of items, choice of response processes, internal structure, and interrelationship of a measure's variables. This research set out to explore the validity and potential utility of an…