a comparative study on evaluating of knowledge and clinical practices of midwifery students in the courses of physiopathology, infectious and internal diseases and surgery based on objective structured clinical examination and traditional assessment methods

background: objective structured clinical examination (osce) is one of the best methods of evaluating the achievement of domains such as educational objectives and cognitive, emotional, and psycho-motor aspects of medical students. according to available evidences, no study has been conducted  on the evaluating of osce in midwifery students. the main purpose of this study was the evaluation of knowledge and clinical practices of midwifery students in the courses of physiopathology, infectious, and internal diseases and surgery based on osce method, compared with traditional and with the final clinical traineeship score. methods: this study was performed on 39 midwifery students at the end of the third year of their education in islamic azad university of karaj. the osce was performed in 10 different stations based on five practical purposes. a week later, traditional evaluation was performed using multiple choice questions and essays. then final clinical examination was applied in next semester, when they passed their traineeship course. the scores in three evaluation methods were compared and correlation between the scores were reported. results: the mean (standard deviation) score of osce, traditional, and clinical exams were 85.29 (8.90), 62.76 (10.80) and 81.50 (3.22) respectively. based on the results of pearson correlation test, there was no significant difference between the three evaluation methods mutually. there was a poor correlation between scores obtained from traditional and clinical (r=0.30, p value=0.068), traditional and osce (r=0.19, p value=0.123) and clinical and osce (r=0.06, p value=0.728) evaluations. mixed mode analysis showed a significant difference in the average scores when three evaluation methods of osce, traditional and clinical were compared (p<0.001, f (2, 83) =91.8). conclusions: this study showed that osce is a good way to evaluate midwifery students&apos; clinical skills.