Series Description

Innovations in health care education require the simultaneous development of creative new approaches to student assessment.  This IAMSE webcast seminar series will explore these issues and provide several examples of how schools are evolving with assessment approaches.  Many, if not most, contemporary health science curricula are exploring the integrated learning of multiple basic science disciplines in the clinical and social contexts of patient care.  These teaching and learning approaches require new and creative assessment tools to monitor student progress.  Faculty training to develop and implement these changes is also critical since constructing high quality, reliable assessment tools is a learned skill.  Assessment includes formative feedback to students as an effective learning activity, and this is increasingly incorporated into modern curricula.  Students are also being taught life-long learning skills and are expected to be independent learners.  Yet how can faculty or accreditation agencies be assured of progress towards continued professional growth and competency?  As post-curricular, graduate medical educational programs change to more benchmark approaches to measure competency, how will this impact the approaches to learning and assessment in medical and other health science curricula?  These and other issues will be the focus of our five seminars.

Webinar Description

Bruce Bates, D.O. Senior Vice President for Cognitive Testing of the National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners (NBOME) will present on the mission and assessment products of the NBOME with a description of one new product and a new product under development. The Comprehensive Osteopathic Medical Achievement Test (COMAT), an end of service assessment utilization, acceptance and performance will be described along with a brief outline of its correlation with licensing and certification performance. Modeled on a process utilized by The Medical Council of Canada, a new product, Clinical Decision Making (CDM, that is under development will apply a key features approach in an open ended and short answer format for clinical presentations scenarios. The concept development and pilot process will be discussed.

The National Board of Medical Examiners® (NBME®) offers two online platforms for the design, construction and delivery of local web-based examinations: Customized Assessment Services (CAS) and the Global Evaluation Management System™ (GEMS™).  Melanie Nelson, Program Manager for Products & Services, will offer participants a look into how CAS, which offers a pool of 10,000+ high quality, secure items assembled from the NBME basic science bank, has helped faculty develop exams to meet a variety of assessment needs.   Participants will also be provided with an example of how one school has used the GEMS versatile end-to-end assessment management to link items in a Nervous Systems course in a way that allows students and faculty to evaluate study habits and use resources to improve specific learning styles.

Target Audience

DMU faculty and staff.

Speaker(s)

Bruce P. Bates and Melanie V. Nelson