Using Video Recording in Evaluating Students’ Clinical Skills

Abstract

This study was done to assess if the results of the evaluation of a student during an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) were similar to the evaluation using a video recording of the same OSCE (VOSCE). Eleven participants participated in a mock OSCE. They were evaluated by two groups of faculty, one physically present (OSCE group) and one which evaluated based on a video recording alone (VOSCE group). Both groups were asked to do a repeat evaluation 4 weeks after based on a rearranged video recording. It was found that the median scores of the students from the OSCE group did not significantly differ from their scores given by those in the VOSCE group (p value >0.05). Using the intraclass correlation coefficients, it was found that there was a high inter-observer reliability among the evaluators within the same group, whether OSCE (ICC = 0.945, P value <0.001) or VOSCE (ICC = 0.859, P value <0.001). There was a low intra-observer reliability among the OSCE group (6 of 10 evaluators with significantly different scores). There was a high intra-observer reliability among the VOSCE group (7 of 8 evaluators with excellent agreement). Our results show that evaluating the clinical skills of a student by using a video recording is as reliable as the more traditional live evaluation.