The Role of Videotaped Clinical Skills Aggregated Peer Evaluations in the Enhancement of Evaluation Skills of Individual Medical School Faculty Members

Abstract

The conventional methodology for appraising medical students has some limitations like inherent subjectivity, unstructured nature, and bias. Implementing the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) can mitigate these shortcomings. However, the OSCE presents challenges, including substantial financial costs and time-intensive processes, particularly when assessing a large cohort of students. Consequently, an alternative assessment was needed to keep the advantages of OSCE and mask its limitations, especially in resource-constrained settings. In addition, many scholars have expressed concern over medical students' and interns' inadequate interviewing and physical examination competencies in recent years. Due to easy availability, videotaping is a convenient method for objectively observing students for aggregate review by faculty in order to ascertain what exactly faculty are assessing during medical student evaluations. This technique allows for aggregate faculty group improvement in the ability of educators to assess students' technical proficiency, data collection capabilities, standardized patient interaction demeanor, and strategies for fostering standardized patient comfort. Nonetheless, aggregate evaluation of videotape recordings for faculty assessment development or reliance on verbal feedback from medical students about faculty's ability to assess student skill is a matter of debate. Due to increased subspecialization, the subspecialist or specialist examiners face difficulties in assessing students' skills in specific and/or generalized domains. Despite these challenges, assessing the ability of faculty members' observation and subsequent evaluation of medical trainees remains a vital aspect of assessment throughout various specialties. This paper presents the concept of faculty members individually observing and rating premade recordings of standardized students performing clinical skills for evaluation so that when the individual faculty members' ratings are aggregated and summarized collectively for evaluation by the faculty members as a group, both the group and the individual faculty members will gain a greater understanding of what are appropriate ratings versus outlier ratings.

Keywords: clinical skill teaching; faculty assessment; fourth-year medical student education; instruction improvement; medical education.