Experience of objective structured practical examination in traditional settings of human physiology curriculum.

Introduction: An integral part of a medical curriculum is an appropriate assessment of the students’ clinical competencies since assessment drives learning. A need of a more competence based assessment method led to introduction of Objective Structured Practical Examination (OSPE) which assesses the ‘shows how’ level of the Miller’s pyramid of clinical competence as Traditional Clinical Examination (TCE) focuses on the “knows” and “knows how” aspects .The present study focuses on the experience of OSPE in term of the reliability and validity in comparison with traditional assessment method. Methodology: After the institutional ethical committee approval, a pilot study for comparing TCE with OSPE was conducted with a batch of 50 first MBBS students at K.J.Somaiya medical college in the department of Physiology for 4 consecutive days. Three examiners with teaching experience of 35, 6 and 1 year respectively conducted TCE followed by OSPE which had 10 stations assessing cognitive, psychomotor and affective domain for the same batch of 25 students in each. Results: OSPE had a good face validity and content validly as compared to TCE. Predictive validity using Pearson’s correlation with the final year –end examination for TCE was 0.45 while for OSPE was 0.78 and reliability measured by internal consistency using Cronbach’s alpha for TCE was 0.66 and for OSPE was 0.73 . The inter-station reliability measured affective and psychomotor domain in OSPE was 0.279 and 0.4 respectively while that for cognitive domain was 0.963. Conclusion: OSPE is a reliable and valid assessment tool provided it is more comprehensive and standardized. However it needs to be incorporated with traditional assessment for an overall evaluation of student’s performance.