
RESEARCH LIBRARY
RESEARCH LIBRARY
View the latest publications from members of the NBME research team
Applied Measurement Education: Volume 36, Issue 4, Pages 326-339
This study examines strategies for detecting parameter drift in small-sample equating, crucial for maintaining score comparability in high-stakes exams. Results suggest that methods like mINFIT, mOUTFIT, and Robust-z effectively mitigate drifting anchor items' effects, while caution is advised with the Logit Difference approach. Recommendations are provided for practitioners to manage item parameter drift in small-sample settings.
Advances in Health Sciences Education
Recent advancements enable replacing MCQs with SAQs in high-stakes assessments, but prior research often used small samples under low stakes and lacked time data. This study assesses difficulty, discrimination, and time in a large-scale high-stakes context
Educational Assessment
This study proposes four indices to quantify item influence and distinguishes them from other available item and test measures. We use simulation methods to evaluate and provide guidelines for interpreting each index, followed by a real data application to illustrate their use in practice. We discuss theoretical considerations regarding when influence presents a psychometric concern and other practical concerns such as how the indices function when reducing influence imbalance.
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023), Pages 443-447
This paper presents the ACTA system, which performs automated short-answer grading in the domain of high-stakes medical exams. The system builds upon previous work on neural similarity-based grading approaches by applying these to the medical domain and utilizing contrastive learning as a means to optimize the similarity metric.
Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development: Volume 10
In-training examinations (ITEs) are a popular teaching tool for certification programs. This study examines the relationship between examinees’ performance on the National Commission for Certification of Anesthesiologist Assistants (NCCAA) ITE and the high-stakes NCCAA Certification Examination.
Advancing Natural Language Processing in Educational Assessment: Pages 167-182
This chapter discusses the evolution of natural language processing (NLP) approaches to text representation and how different ways of representing text can be utilized for a relatively understudied task in educational assessment – that of predicting item characteristics from item text.
Advancing Natural Language Processing in Educational Assessment: Pages 58-73
This chapter describes INCITE, an NLP-based system for scoring free-text responses. It emphasizes the importance of context and the system’s intended use and explains how each component of the system contributed to its accuracy.
Similarities Between Clinically Matched and Unmatched Analogue Patient Raters: A Mixed Methods Study
Patient Education and Counseling: Volume 109, Supplement, April 2023, Page 2
Physicians' responses to patient communication were assessed by both clinically matched and unmatched analogue patients (APs). Significant correlations between their ratings indicated consistency in evaluating physician communication skills. Thematic analysis identified twenty-one common themes in both clinically matched and unmatched AP responses, suggesting similar assessments of important behaviors. These findings imply that clinically unmatched APs can effectively substitute for clinically matched ones in evaluating physician communication and offering feedback when the latter are unavailable.
Essays on Contemporary Psychometrics: Pages 163-180
This paper shows that using non-linear functions for equating and score transformations leads to consequences that are not commensurable with classical test theory (CTT). More specifically, a well-known theorem from calculus shows that the expected value of a non-linearly transformed variable does not equal the transformed expected value of this variable.
Academic Medicine: Volume 98 - Issue 2 - Pages 162-170
The US medical education transition from school to residency is resource-intensive. The Coalition for Physician Accountability aims to improve it, emphasizing learner support, diversity, and minimizing conflicts. This study explores key tensions and offers strategies to align the transition with ideal goals, aiding educators and organizations in implementing recommendations.