Influences of OSCE design on students’ diagnostic reasoning

Some characteristics of assessments exert a strong influence on how students study. Understanding these pre‐assessment learning effects is of key importance to the designing of medical assessments that foster students’ reasoning abilities. Perceptions of the task demands of an assessment significantly influence students’ cognitive processes. However, why and how certain tasks positively ‘drive’ learning remain unknown. Medical tasks can be assessed as coherent meaningful whole tasks (e.g. examining a patient based on his complaint to find the diagnosis) or can be divided into simpler part tasks (e.g. demonstrating the physical examination of a pre‐specified disease). Comparing the benefits of whole‐task and part‐task assessments in a randomised controlled experiment could guide the design of ‘assessments for learning’.

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