Journal of Educational Measurement: Volume 58, Issue 4, Pages 515-537
In this paper, the NBME team reports the results an eye-tracking study designed to evaluate how the presence of the options in multiple-choice questions impacts the way medical students responded to questions designed to evaluate clinical reasoning. Examples of the types of data that can be extracted are presented. We then discuss the implications of these results for evaluating the validity of inferences made based on the type of items used in this study.
Teaching and Learning in Medicine: Volume 33 - Issue 4 - p 366-381
CSE scores for students from eight schools that moved Step 1 after core clerkships between 2012 and 2016 were analyzed in a pre-post format. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to quantify the effect of the curriculum on CSE performance. Additional analysis determined if clerkship order impacted clinical subject exam performance and whether the curriculum change resulted in more students scoring in the lowest percentiles before and after the curricular change.
Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 39: 30-36
This article proposes the conscious weight method and subconscious weight method to bring more objectivity to the standard setting process. To do this, these methods quantify the relative harm of the negative consequences of false positive and false negative misclassification.
Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 39: 37-44
This article presents the results of an experiment in which content experts were randomly assigned to one of two response probability conditions: .67 and .80. If the standard-setting judgments collected with the bookmark procedure are internally consistent, both conditions should produce highly similar cut scores.
Journal of Pain and Symptom Management: Volume 56, Issue 3, p371-378
This article reviews the USMLE step examinations to determine whether they test the palliative care (PC) knowledge necessary for graduating medical students and residents applying for licensure.
Journal of Veterinary Medical Education 2018 45:3, 381-387
This study uses item response data from the November–December 2014 and April 2015 NAVLE administrations (n =5,292), to conduct timing analyses comparing performance across several examinee subgroups. The results provide evidence that conditions were sufficient for most examinees, thereby supporting the current time limits. For the relatively few examinees who may have been impacted, results suggest the cause is not a bias with the test but rather the effect of poor pacing behavior combined with knowledge deficits.