Peer assessment of professionalism in undergraduate medical education
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Peer assessment of professionalism in undergraduate medical education Vernon R. Curran* , Nicholas A. Fairbridge and Diana Deacon
Abstract Background: Fostering professional behaviour has become increasingly important in medical education and nontraditional approaches to assessment of professionalism may offer a more holistic representation of students’ professional behaviour development. Emerging evidence suggests peer assessment may offer potential as an alternative method of professionalism assessment. We introduced peer assessment of professionalism in preclerkship phases of undergraduate medical education curriculum at our institution and evaluated suitability of adopting a professional behaviour scale for longitudinal tracking of student development, and student comfort and acceptance of peer assessment. Methods: Peer assessment was introduced using a validated professional behaviours scale. Students conducted repeated, longitudinal assessments of their peers from small-group, clinical skills learning activities. An electronic assessment system was used to collect peer assessments, collate and provide reports to students. Student opinions of peer assessment were initially surveyed before introducing the process, confirmatory analyses were conducted of the adopted scale, and students were surveyed to explore satisfaction with the peer assessment process. Results: Students across all phases of the curriculum were initially supportive of anonymous peer assessment using small-group learning sessions. Peer scores showed improvement over time, however the magnitude of increase was limited by ceiling effects attributed to the adopted scale. Students agreed that the professional behaviours scale was easy to use and understand, however a majority disagreed that peer assessment improved their understanding of professionalism or was a useful learning experience. Conclusions: Peer assessment of professional behaviours does expose students to the process of assessing one’s peers, however the value of such processes at early stages of medical education may not be fully recognized nor appreciated by students. Electronic means for administering peer assessment is feasible for collecting and reporting peer feedback. Improvement in peer assessed scores was observed over time, however student opinions of the educational value were mixed and indeterminate. Keywords: Peer assessment, Undergraduate medical education, Professionalism
* Correspondence: [email protected] Office of Professional and Educational Development, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland A1B 3V6, Canada © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third
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