Assessing situational judgement tests for team leadership in medical residents

Team leadership is a core competency of medical graduates. The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate the validity and acceptability of a situational judgment test (SJT) to assess team leadership in residents.

We followed protocols for the development of construct-driven SJTs. A 27-question SJT was developed using a multistage process: construct definition, test construction, and test evaluation. The final SJT was administered to 133 years 2 to 4 residents and was evaluated using item-level analyses, internal consistency, confirmatory factor analysis and residents' reactions.

The item difficulty indices ranged from 0.79 to 0.90 and partial correlations were between 0.11 and 0.41. The level of internal consistency of SJT was 0.76. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed an acceptable model fit. Over 96% of participants rated the SJT as appropriate for assessing different aspects of team leadership and increasing team leadership awareness.

This study reports the initial efforts toward the development of an SJT for team leadership in residents. The findings indicate that the SJT can assess all dimensions of the construct of team leadership in residency training which can be used for offering focused feedback and coaching to residents on team leadership behaviors.