The nature of healthcare means doctors must continually calibrate the quality of their work within constantly changing standards of practice. As trainees move into working as fully qualified professionals, they can struggle to know how well they are practising in the absence of formal oversight. They therefore need to build their evaluative…

Human judgement is widely used in workplace-based assessment despite criticism that it does not meet standards of objectivity. There is an ongoing push within the literature to better embrace subjective human judgement in assessment not as a 'problem' to be corrected psychometrically but as legitimate perceptions of performance. Taking a step back…

When physicians are asked to determine the positive predictive value from the a priori probability of a disease and the sensitivity and false positive rate of a medical test (Bayesian reasoning), it often comes to misjudgments with serious consequences. In daily clinical practice, however, it is not only important that doctors receive a tool with…

It is well-documented that retrieval practice enhances the recall of simple and complex information (Karpicke and Aue in Educ Psychol Rev 27(2):317-326, 2015). Evidence is also accumulating that retrieval practice can enhance other cognitive processes such as the ability to critically evaluate research articles (Dobson et al. in Med Educ…

Medical schools, programs and educators are increasingly expected to address medical student stress and wellbeing, yet also ensure student competence and fitness to practice. Educators play a central role in supporting students when evaluating a student's concerns and in deciding whether support and/or sanction should be offered. It is not known…

Sequential context effects, the psychological interactions occurring between the events of successive trials when a sequence of similar stimuli are judged, have interested psychologists for decades. It has been well established that individuals exhibit sequential context effects in psychophysical experiments involving unidimensional stimuli.…

Competency-based assessment is placing increasing emphasis on the direct observation of learners. For this process to produce valid results, it is important that raters provide quality judgments that are accurate. Unfortunately, the quality of these judgments is variable and the roles of factors that influence the accuracy of those judgments are…

While portfolios are increasingly used to assess competence, the validity of such portfolio-based assessments has hitherto remained unconfirmed. The purpose of the present research is therefore to further our understanding of how assessors form judgments when interpreting the complex data included in a competency-based portfolio. Eighteen…

This study explored the contribution of peer-assisted learning (PAL) in the development of evaluative judgement capacity; the ability to understand work quality and apply those standards to appraising performance. The study employed a mixed methods approach, collecting self-reported survey data, observations of, and reflective interviews with, the…

Simulation-based teaching (SBT) is increasingly used in medical education. As an alternative to other teaching methods there is a lack of evidence concerning its efficacy. The aim of this study was to evaluate the potency of SBT in anesthesia in comparison to problem-based discussion (PBD) with students in a randomized controlled setting.…

Every day physicians make judgments about patient management and diagnosis based on less than perfect information from many different sources. Judgment and decision-making research has taught us a great deal about such decisions, but these insights rarely find their way into the medical curriculum. One productive line of investigation in the study…

Despite the critical importance of maintaining a valid and transparent selection process that serves the values held by all stakeholders involved in medical education (i.e., students, faculty, society), there continue to be problems with the current state of available admissions protocols. Some problems derive from inertia induced by inaccurate…