Pivoting during a Pandemic: Reimagining Intern Orientation EPA-Based OSCE.

Objectives: Objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) provide reliable and standardized means for assessing the performance of specific clinical skills. Our previous experience with entrustable professional activity-based multidisciplinary OSCEs suggests that this exercise offers just-in-time baseline information regarding critical intern skills. The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic forced medical education programs to reimagine such educational experiences.

Investigating the validity of web-enabled mechanistic case diagramming scores to assess students' integration of foundational and clinical sciences.

As medical schools have changed their curricula to address foundational and clinical sciences in a more integrated fashion, teaching methods such as concept mapping have been incorporated in small group learning settings. Methods that can assess students' ability to apply such integrated knowledge are not as developed, however. The purpose of this project was to assess the validity of scores on a focused version of concept maps called mechanistic case diagrams (MCDs), which are hypothesized to enhance existing tools for assessing integrated knowledge that supports clinical reasoning.

Using infant mannequins in objective standardized clinical examinations: are there unintended consequences?

Objective: In objective standardized clinical examination (OSCE) of infants, real infants are generally not used. Instead, the standardized patient portrays a parent who answers a student's questions, and there is no physical examination. One way to assess physical examination skills in these encounters is to have students demonstrate the appropriate examination on a mannequin.

Appraising and applying evidence about a diagnostic test during a performance-based assessment.

Background: The practice of Evidence-based Medicine requires that clinicians assess the validity of published research and then apply the results to patient care. We wanted to assess whether our soon-to-graduate medical students could appraise and apply research about a diagnostic test within a clinical context and to compare our students with peers trained at other institutions.

Methods: 4th year medical students who previously had demonstrated competency at probability revision and just starting first-year Internal Medicine residents were used for this research.