What are Creative Communities?
Creative Communities are NBME-funded programs under the NBME Assessment Alliance initiative. These communities bring together medical educators, medical school staff, learners and NBME staff in a collective effort to solve the pressing challenges in assessment we face today.
Each community will convene around a specific theme and scope of work, such as the assessment of a specific construct or competency, an assessment method or format, or the use of assessment information to inform learner progress and decision-making. The Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) for Clinical Reasoning is the first NBME Creative Community.
The OSCE for Clinical Reasoning Creative Community
The purpose of the OSCE for Clinical Reasoning Creative Community is to collectively develop solutions that promote and measure clinical reasoning using school-based OSCEs. This Creative Community is designed to identify and develop incremental solutions with the goal of:
- Enhancing the development and assessment of learner clinical reasoning skills
- Presenting patient groups without bias or stereotypes
- Minimizing group differences in learner outcomes
- Enabling all institutions to better support learner skill development across the continuum of medical education and training
If you have any questions, please email creativecommunity@nbme.org.
Community Updates
Since the selection of our Community members in April 2022, NBME staff and Creative Community members have been engaged in the following activities:
- Ideating solutions to assess clinical reasoning using the OSCE format: Numerous challenges were described and prioritized, and the Community has begun to consider creative solutions, varying from new post-encounter exercises to new case formats to new platforms of assessment.
- Formulating sub-teams to focus on distinct competencies within the domain of clinical reasoning: Each team is focused on specific clinical reasoning skills.
- Ensuring alignment with evidence-centered approaches to assessment development: While each sub-team works independently to ideate solutions, NBME staff provide guidance on evidence-centered principles to ensure that the assessment development process supports the inferences that educators want to make about learners.
OSCE for Clinical Reasoning Evidence-Centered Approach

Looking ahead into 2023, the OSCE Creative Community will plan proof-of-concept pilots for the new assessment approaches developed from the sub-teams and begin to engage medical students in this work.
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