Twelve tips for improving the quality of assessor judgements in senior medical student clinical assessments.

Assessment of senior medical students is usually calibrated at the level of achieving expected learning outcomes for graduation. Recent research reveals that clinical assessors often balance two slightly different perspectives on this benchmark. The first is the formal learning outcomes at graduation, ideally as part of a systematic, program-wide assessment approach that measures learning achievement, while the second is consideration of the candidate's contribution to safe care and readiness for practice as a junior doctor.

Virtual OSCE Delivery and Quality Assurance During a Pandemic: Implications for the Future.

Background: During 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused worldwide disruption to the delivery of clinical assessments, requiring medicals schools to rapidly adjust their design of established tools. Derived from the traditional face-to-face Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), the virtual OSCE (vOSCE) was delivered online, using a range of school-dependent designs. The quality of these new formats was evaluated remotely through virtual quality assurance (vQA).

Developing a community of practice for quality assurance within healthcare assessment.

Background: The Australian Collaboration for Clinical Assessment in Medicine (ACCLAiM) is a voluntary assessment consortium, involving medical schools nationwide. The aims of ACCLAiM are to benchmark student clinical assessment outcomes and to provide quality assurance (QA) of exit-level Objective Structured Clinical Exams (OSCEs). This study aimed to evaluate the impact of the ACCLAiM QA process for optimising OSCE delivery standards at the member schools using a Community of Practice (CoP) framework.

Exploring tutor perceptions and current practices in facilitating diagnostic reasoning in preclinical medical students: Implications for tutor professional development needs.

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. This study explores tutors' experience of teaching diagnostic reasoning (DR) - a key component of clinical reasoning - to build understanding into the use of explicit strategies in facilitating development of DR skills in preclinical medical students.