A videotape technique for measuring clinical skills: three years of experience

This paper presents three years of positive experience in using audiovisual technique to evaluate the ability of medical students to observe psychopathology after a psychobiology system course in the second year. The validity of this technique was reported in an earlier article. The technique has students complete the Lorr Inpatient Multidimensional Psychiatric Scale (IMPS) after they see a videotape of an interview with a psychiatric patient. A consensus of psychiatric preceptors is used as a standard of accuracy. Performance on this audiovisual examination is not related to other measures in the course, namely the multiple choice examination, essay, or preceptor evaluation of the individual students during clinical days, nor to other performance in the first two years of medical school. The author recommends the use of standardized objective audiovisual techniques to measure performance in those portions of medical education that include clinical teaching.