Communication assessment using the common ground instrument: psychometric properties

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Communication Skills Assessment

Background:

• Medical education guidelines emphasize communication skills training and assessment.
• The Toronto and Kalamazoo consensus statements highlight core generic communication competencies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To validate the Common Ground instrument for assessing medical students' communication skills.
• To align assessment with established communication competencies in medical education.

Main Methods:

• 100 medical students participated in four-station objective structured clinical examinations.
• Trained raters used the Common Ground instrument for checklist and global ratings.
• Expert panels provided global assessments of representative interviews.

Main Results:

• Common Ground demonstrated high inter-rater reliability (0.85 global, 0.92 checklist).
• The instrument showed good generalizability (0.80 coefficient for 50 minutes).
• Ratings correlated highly with expert assessments (0.84).

Conclusions:

• The Common Ground assessment instrument is reliable and valid for evaluating core communication skills.
• It possesses sufficient generalizability for making decisions on medical students' performance.
• This validated tool can be integrated into medical education assessment frameworks.