Can Written Communication Skills Be Tested in an Objective Structured Clinical Examination Format?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: To design and evaluate an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) station on dictating a consult letter as part of a formative OSCE for internal medicine residents. METHOD: A 22-minute station for the dictation of a consult letter was included in a ten-station OSCE. Two raters completed a 34-item rating scale for 36 letters. The rating scale involved content and style. The station's score was derived from an overall rating of each section of the letter (history, physical examination, impression/plan) and a global rating of the complete letter. The exam also contained a physical exam station on the same patient problem and a verbal communication station. Residents provided written feedback following the station. RESULTS: The inter-rater reliability for the station's score was .72. The generalizability coefficient for the two-rater four-part rating scale was .79. The correlation between the consult letter and the total exam scores was .56, the highest for all ten stations. A significant correlation existed between the verbal communication station's score and the letter station's score (r =.37, p <.005), but no correlation occurred between the physical exam station's score on a similar patient problem and the letter station's score. The feedback from residents was favorable regarding amount of information provided and time allotted. CONCLUSION: An OSCE station is a feasible way to examine written communication skills. Letter-writing skills appear to be distinct from knowledge (physical exam station), but somewhat linked to verbal communication skills.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".