A part of 4.2 Inquiry on Teaching and Learning Poster + Talk
Sharona Kanofsky, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Physician Assistant Program, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Temerty Faculty of Medicine
Dr. Peter Tzakas, Program Director, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Physician Assistant Program
In this session, we will describe our experience shifting from an in-person to virtual examination format. The Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is a common, often high-stakes, performance examination in which medical learners demonstrate their clinical competence in history-taking, physical examination, clinical reasoning, diagnosis, treatment, and more. The OSCE helps educators assess learners’ readiness to practice. During the pandemic, our Physician Assistant (PA) Program was restricted from conducting our usual end-of-program in-person OSCE. As a blended-distance education program, we were already familiar with online education. We designed, implemented, and conducted a virtual OSCE (vOSCE) in 2020. Following the vOSCE, we surveyed our students and faculty examiners to explore their perceptions and understand their experiences, using a qualitative data analysis approach. Students and examiners identified both strengths and limitations of the vOSCE format. The vOSCE was overall considered fair, smooth, convenient, and appropriate for assessing many clinical competencies. However, some elements were difficult to assess, such as many physical examinations and non-verbal forms of communication. Our findings aligned well with the small body of existing research on vOSCE. Due to the relative success of the first vOSCE, it was repeated in 2021 and will likely be the standard format for our program in future years. We continue to collect feedback from learners and faculty, and plan to conduct further psychometric analysis comparing the in-person and virtual formats. Our findings can be applied to other disciplines considering shifting performance assessments to a virtual format.
This is a great example of how the affordances of technology got us through the pandemic, and how your assessment of the virtual exam experience can inform what to do now that you make choices by design. Really interesting work!