Editorial

Abstract

We are into only the third issue of The Clinical Teacher and already certain themes are beginning to appear. One of the most common questions people asked as we planned the launch of the magazine was would we include something on assessment; and especially, on assessment blueprints. In our very first issue we published an article by Lambert Schuwirth about assessing medical competence1 in which he described how modern assessment programmes aim to combine a range of assessment methods rather than rely on just one particular format. But how do you decide what to assess from all the things students have been taught, let alone how do you choose the best assessment method to do this fairly and reliably? In this issue we have two papers that address these questions by describing test blueprints. In the first, Kathy Bouriscot and Trudie Roberts describe how to run a successful OSCE testing a range of clinical skills. They show how important it is to select stations carefully and to plan every detail of the examination. The second paper takes a rather different approach and in the tradition of great teachers, uses a well known popular story to describe the development of an examination in the care of magical creatures. The test blueprint demonstrates how assessors might approach the problem of recognising a Knarl amongst a group of hedgehogs or testing a candidate's ability to communicate effectively with a Bowtruckle – whilst not perhaps core clinical skills for today's medical student (even in the most radical curriculum!) the article helpfully simplifies an aspect of assessment many find challenging. Story telling is a key component of teaching and of clinical practice and two further papers in this issue use the approach to great effect. We have touched on problem-based learning (PBL) in previous issues, and I know it is a subject of considerable interest to readers because papers describing PBL or reporting studies of its effectiveness are amongst the most frequently downloaded from the website of our sister journal Medical Education2. Although it has been around in medical schools across the world for many years, PBL is a relatively new technique to many teachers. John Hamilton describes his 36 years of experience with PBL as a teaching approach intimately bound up with his own international professional career as an educator. John traces its roots back to Abraham Flexner and raises interesting questions about what the future may hold as succeeding generations of teachers develop the method, and the PBL philosophy, in a wide range of clinical settings. Finally, Kyle Harrison and David Gaba from the US use a dramatic clinical story to illustrate how simulation is becoming increasingly important in the training of intensive care and anaesthetic practitioners. Clinical skills teaching is a rapidly growing area in medical education and the use of simulators is proving to be a particularly exciting development – of especial interest to medical education researchers and clinicians because outcomes are so easily measured.