Content validity of workplace-based portfolios: A multi-centre study

Portfolios are used as tools to coach and assess students in the workplace. This study sought to evaluate the content validity of portfolios as reflected in their capacity to adequately assess achieved competences of medical students during clerkships.

We reviewed 120 workplace portfolios at three medical universities (Belgium and the Netherlands). To validate their content, we developed a Validity Inventory for Portfolio Assessment (VIPA) based on the CanMEDS roles. Two raters evaluated each portfolio and indicated for each VIPA item whether the portfolio provided sufficient information to enable satisfactory assessment of the item. We ran a descriptive analysis on the validation data and computed Cohen's Kappa to investigate interrater agreement.

The portfolios adequately covered the items pertaining to the communicator (90%) and professional (87%) roles. Coverage of the medical expert, collaborator, scholar and manager roles ranged between 75% and 85%. The health advocate role, covering 59%, was clearly less well represented. This role also exhibited little interrater agreement (Kappa < 0.4).

This study lends further credence to the evidence that portfolios can indeed adequately assess the different CanMEDS roles during clerkships, the health advocate role, which was less well represented in the portfolio content, excepted.