The Cognitive Science Research group at ETS conducts research and development at the forefront of educational assessment, using cognitive theory in the design of assessments, building cognitive models to guide interpretation of test-takers’ performance, and researching cognitive issues in the context of assessment. Moving beyond traditional (e.g., multiple-choice) tests, the group investigates ...

An Objective Structured Clinical Assessment (OSCA) method was adopted by a course team in an attempt to resolve some of the learning difficulties experienced by the baccalaureate nursing students in clinical practice. The assessment required the students to work through some simulations developed from real encounters. The performance of the students was evaluated against the checklists which we...

Since the development of problem-based learning curricula, medical educators have viewed tutorials as an ideal context within which medical student competence can be assessed. Advantages of tutorial-based assessment include, (a) evaluation based on prolonged and intense interactions between students, peers, and tutors, (b) the opportunity to assess domains of competence that are not readily ass...

BACKGROUND In the United Kingdom (UK), medical schools are free to develop local systems and policies that govern student assessment and progression. Successful completion of an undergraduate medical degree results in the automatic award of a provisional licence to practice medicine by the General Medical Council (GMC). Such a licensing process relies heavily on the assumption that individual s...

INTRODUCTION As medical education becomes more decentralised, and greater use is made of rural clinical schools and other dispersed sites, attention is being paid to the quality of the learning experiences across these sites. This article explores this issue by analysing the performance data of 4 cohorts of students in a dispersed clinical school model across 4 sites. The study is set in a newl...

Brown SJ, White S, Power N. Tracking undergraduate student achievement in a first-year physiology course using a cluster analysis approach. Adv Physiol Educ 39: 278–282, 2015; doi:10.1152/advan.00076.2015.—A cluster analysis data classification technique was used on assessment scores from 157 undergraduate nursing students who passed 2 successive compulsory courses in human anatomy and physiolo...

PURPOSE To prove the hypothesis that procedural knowledge might be tested using Key Feature (KF) questions in written exams, the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover Foundation (TiHo) pioneered this format in summative assessment of veterinary medicine students. Exams in veterinary medicine are either tested orally, practically, in written form or digitally in written form. The only quest...

M has been written about the continual assessment of clinical practice and the theoretical aspects of the general science and art o f nursing. This article aims to clarify the practical aspects o f assessment rather than to discuss the numerous theories. Firstly, we need to define that we mean by evaluation or assessment. According to Reilly, “ Evaluation is a positive process whose primary pur...

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether using a parametric statistic in comparing groups leads to different conclusions when using summative scores from rating scales compared with using their corresponding Rasch-based measures. METHODS A Monte Carlo simulation study was designed to examine between-group differences in the change scores derived from summative scores from rating scales, and those der...