Turning the tables on oscA’s: our students create the Assessments.

Mary F. Kritzer*, Elza Mylona, Stony Brook University School of Medicine, Stony Brook, New York, 11794 U.S.A.

PURPOSE: Beginning medical students are exposed to learning experiences tapping curricular competencies beyond medical knowledge. Because these can be unfamiliar to students, our Neuroscience course incorporated content-specific learning objectives into an assignment that tasked students with creating cases, patient and student scripts and grading rubrics for an Objective Standardized Clinical Assessment (OSCA) based on stroke. The challenging area of nervous system blood supply was a natural focus for medical knowledge objectives while other components of the exercise were designed to enhance students’ abilities to self-monitor learning and increase their understanding of additional educational/competency objectives associated with OSCAs.

METHODS: Year 1 students worked in groups with each member assigned an artery and responsibility for anatomically mapping a stroke; for identifying brain structures and functions affected by it; for translating clinical consequences into patient scripts; for generating question sets for doctor/patient encounters; for developing grading rubrics for the ten competencies adopted by SB’s curriculum; and for reviewing/approving each individual’s contributions.

RESULTS: Completion of the exercise required teamwork, shared learning of nervous system blood supply, demonstrations of logic and the use of multiple styles of audience-appropriate communications.

CONCLUSIONS/FUTURE DIRECTIONS: In addition to enabling evaluation of medical knowledge, communications and problem solving, the grading rubrics that students generated provided unique insights into what were self-identified as salient features of successful OSCA performance for SB’s ten core curricular competencies.