How to Design and Apply an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) in Medical Education?

Said Said Elshama

doi:10.53986/ibjm.2021.0009

Abstract

The Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is considered a gold standard summative and formative assessment method wherein it is a comprehensive and standardized tool assessing the clinical competencies including psychomotor domain, attitudes, and behaviors that will be manifested in the real work of the medical graduates. Therefore, the implementation of OSCE depends on the design of a blueprint that consists of two axes; the first axis is the tested competencies according to the learning objectives while the second axis represents a system or problem that is related to these competencies. Thus, the blueprint of OSCE is a translation for the learning objectives into clinical competences such as history taking, physical examination, radiographic and laboratory data interpretation, technical skills, attitudinal behaviors, and counseling skills. In addition, the utility index proved that OSCE has a good balance for acceptability, reliability, validity, credibility, feasibility, cost, and educational impact. However, the use of OSCE for the students' assessment is considered expensive and exhausted because it requires many facilities, a great deal of the personnel besides the needed consuming time for its application.

Highlights

Practical clinical training and assessment of the medical student should be closely matched
The Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is considered a gold standard summative and formative assessment method wherein it is a comprehensive and standardized tool assessing the clinical competencies including psychomotor domain, attitudes, and behaviors that will be manifested in the real work of the medical graduates
The use of the real environment or authentic situation for the learning and the assessment of medical competence are essential to promote the learning because the learning within a relevant context enables the medical students to store and retrieve the knowledge in a better way [1]

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Practical clinical training and assessment of the medical student should be closely matched. OSCE is designed for clinical and theoretical knowledge application wherein the theoretical knowledge is required with the standardized questions It is considered an objective exam because it is based on using the same stations and the same assessment checklist in the student evaluation to enable the student to get marks for every performed step. The use of detailed checklists in OSCE may decrease inter-rater unreliability and reinforces the reliability because the test results depend on the direct observation and the repeated measurements that help the examiner to assess many different qualitative aspects such as efficiency and the student skill performance It is considered valid test or exam because it depends on multifactor such as the blueprinting, the scoring system, and the standardized criteria besides authenticity that is considered an essential and contributing factor for the validity [6]

WHAT IS THE OSCE?

HOW TO ORGANIZE AND APPLY THE OSCE?

Procedures

CONCLUSIONS