Perception of Students and Examiners about Objective Structured Clinical Examination in a Teaching Hospital in Ethiopia

Abstract

Introduction The objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) has become a standard assessment tool in undergraduate medical school training. It is considered an objective assessment of practical skill of students. OSCE is a resource demanding assessment method that can have numerous challenges. Comprehensive assessment of perception regarding OSCE can help identify areas that need improvement. The aim of this study was to assess the perception of students and examiners towards OSCE. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted on students and examiners undertaking OSCE from May 1 to July 30, 2021, using a structured questionnaire. Comparison of variables was done using Mann–Whitney U -Test and Chi-square test. P-value <0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results A total of 141 students and 39 examiners participated in the study. The majority of the students and examiners had a positive response regarding the attributes, structure, organization and validity of OSCE. It was recommended to be used in future exams compared to other assessments by 38.3% of students and 51.3% of examiners. There were certain challenges reported by students and included stressfulness of the exam (51.1%), inadequate time (27.6%), and unsatisfactory orientation (30.5%). One-third of examiners considered it stressful, while 20.5% considered the time provided to be inadequate. Equipment to conduct the exam was considered inadequate by 39.1% and 56.4% of students and examiners, respectively. Around 80.1% of students recommended mock sessions and 23.1% of examiners did not have any prior training on OSCE. Conclusion An overall positive perception of OSCE by students and examiners was seen. Certain challenges that need improvements were identified. Continuing evaluation and refinement of OSCE by departments is needed. We recommend further wide-scale national evaluation of the OSCE examination system of medical students.

Health science students’ perceptions about Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) as a method of clinical evaluation

“…Furthermore, 62.3% of the participants believed that OSCE as an evaluation method covered a broad spectrum of critical areas. These findings are in line with the outcomes of previous studies, which showed that more than two-thirds of their participants perceived OSCE as a fair testing tool for knowledge, covered various clinical skills, and substantiated that OSCE meditates what students learn in their courses [6,17,42,43]. Thus, these studies' participants developed positive attributes [6,44] and favorable attitudes toward OSCE, i.e., the mean attitude score of participants toward OSCE was 85.71 with a standard deviation of 8.50 [16].…”

“…Simultaneously, a continuous review of scenarios for each OSCE station should occur before actual clinical skills evaluation. As a result, the more OSCE assessment audit carried out, the more advanced the evaluation method of OSCE in an institution [31,42]. Hence, many educators consider OSCE as an effective evaluation method for practical clinical skills because of the significant benefits of OSCE over the disadvantages that it causes [31,49,50,51].…”

Autonomic stress response of physiotherapy student in the different scenarios of an objective structured clinical examination

“…Interaction among examiners and students have been highlighted as stressor by previous studies (Fisseha & Desalegn, 2021;Majumder et al, 2019) using indirect tools (surveys) to examine stress. According to our HRV results, this could explain the high stress response in the non-interactive written scenarios (S4 and S9) in which students do not interact with patients but only with examiners.…”

Autonomic stress response of physiotherapy student in the different scenarios of an objective structured clinical examination

“…The increased stress response was also observed in physiotherapy students, where a high anticipatory anxiety response was evaluated at both, subjective and objective level, in clinical simulations, not achieving the expected habituation [13]. In this line, several studies based on students self-perception questionnaires, have reported the OSCE as an "anxiety provoking assessment method" due to scenarios timing, the proximity of the evaluator and the high expectation to succeed [7,19]. Academic events such as OSCE, practices and final degree defence confront the students with a potentially stressful and warning situation.…”