Validity Evidence for Procedure-specific Competence Assessment Tools in General Surgery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This study aims to provide a focused and detailed assessment of the validity evidence supporting procedure-specific operative assessment tools in general surgery. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA: Competency-based assessment tools should be supported by robust validity evidence to be used reliably for evaluation of operative skills. The contemporary framework of validity relies on five sources of evidence: content, response process, internal structure, relation to other variables, and consequences. METHODS: A systematic search of 8 databases was conducted for studies containing procedure-specific operative assessment tools in general surgery. The validity evidence supporting each tool was assessed and scored in alignment with the contemporary framework of validity. Methodological rigour of studies was assessed with the Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument. The educational utility of each tool was assessed with the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education framework. RESULTS: There were 28 studies meeting inclusion criteria and 23 unique tools were assessed. Scores for validity evidence varied widely between tools, ranging from 3 - 14 (maximum 15). Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument scores assessing the quality of study methodology were also variable (8.5-15.5, maximum 16.5). Direct reporting of educational utility criteria was limited. CONCLUSIONS: This study has identified a small group of procedure-specific operative assessment tools in general surgery. Many of these tools have limited validity evidence and have not been studied sufficiently to be used reliably in high-stakes summative assessments. As general surgery transitions to competency-based training, a more robust library of operative assessment tools will be required to support resident education and evaluation.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".