advanced assessment of medical students’ clinical performance: challenges, methods and approaches

background: assessment of clinical competencies is one of the complicated and hard tasks in medical education. nowadays, assessment of clinical performance is significantly patient centered, and student centered. traditional methods consisted of faculties’ observations, oral examinations, and multiple-choice tests. increased faculties’ workload, discontent with traditional methods of clinical skill assessment and developments in the fields of psychology and education have led to the formation of new modalities in performance assessment methods with special definition. clinical competency is defined as the ability to gather information from the patient by history taking and physical examination, integrating this information in order to make a diagnosis, selecting appropriate laboratory tests to confirm the diagnosis and efficient disease management.   at the present time, several fields for future direction of performance assessment in medical education are suggested, including:   a) evidence-based locally developed assessments   b) understanding educational outcomes and non-cognitive assessment factors   c) increase in student-driven aspect of assessments.   attempting to introduce new and advanced medical students’ clinical performance assessment methods according to the world accredited centers, this article analyzed three mentioned directions in field of clinical performance assessment. conclusion : improvement of performance assessment in local or national level is a complex issue which needs time, cooperation, recourses and fundamental attempts. however, this is the price to pay if we believe that clinical competency can improve quality of patient care.