Peer assessment of professional competence

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Competency Assessment
• Professionalism in Medicine

Background:

• Traditional medical student assessments excel at evaluating knowledge and basic skills.
• Assessing crucial domains like interpersonal skills, humanism, and teamwork remains underdeveloped.
• This study introduces peer assessment as a novel method for evaluating medical student professional competence for formative feedback.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and implement a peer assessment tool for measuring medical students' professional competence.
• To evaluate the reliability and validity of peer assessment scores.
• To explore the relationship between peer assessments and other existing performance measures.

Main Methods:

• Second-year medical students utilized an online instrument to assess peer professional competence.
• Each student was evaluated by fifteen randomly selected classmates.
• Peer assessment data were analyzed for reliability, validity, and correlation with other assessment outcomes.

Main Results:

• Factor analysis revealed two dimensions of professional competence: Work Habits and Interpersonal Habits.
• Work Habits demonstrated moderate, significant correlations (0.21-0.53) with other performance measures.
• Approximately six peer raters are necessary to achieve a generalizability coefficient of 0.70.

Conclusions:

• Peer assessment is a viable method for formative feedback in undergraduate medical education.
• The study highlights the potential for peer assessment in programs with ample opportunities for peer observation.
• Implementing peer assessment can enhance the comprehensive evaluation of medical student professionalism.