Impact of progress test on clinical skills performance
Another aspect to consider is how much does the testing itself impact students’ clinical skills performance. The positive effect of progress testing as one of the tools for formative assessment on the basic medical knowledge retention has already been shown. There is less data about progress clinical skills progress testing. 10,11
Our clinical progress test was a low-stakes test, which depends on students’ test-taking effort. 18 Therefore, each student was given a Test-effort Short Scale (TESS) before each testing. Lefroy et al. found that in workplace-based assessments, that in a low risk environment there is a risk of reducing self-efficacy. This is due to some students being encouraged to focus on proving their ability rather than on improvement of skills. Moreover, different degrees of receptiveness to formative feedback appear to depend on performance in summative assessment.26 As assessment is common in the workplace-based environment and students usually expect to receive grades as an assessment tool, we predicted that there would be a positive correlation between the TESS score and total OSCE score. We expected that students with higher TESS score would be more motivated and eager to achieve better total OSCE score. Results show that our study detected no statistical correlation between TESS score and total OSCE results. As there was no correlation, we can predict that there were no anomalies due to students’ annoyance during testing.