Theme
Clinical
INSTITUTION
Faculty of Medicine, Khon Kaen University
Summative evaluation of the clinical-year (4th, 5th and 6th year) medical curriculum in department of medicine, Khon Kaen University, includes 3 compartments: theory, clinical skill examination and clerkship practical performance. Students must pass all of three parts with the minimal passing level (MPL) of 60% for theory and clinical skill examination and of 65% for clerkship practical performance. We evaluated our students' summative evaluation performance and study the correlation between theory and clinical skill.
We retrospective studied our students’ theory and clinical skill performance in 2012 and analysed the correlation between theory and clinical skill evaluation using Pearson’s correlation coefficient and Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient.
Figure 1 Our students' performance focus on students who failed.
Table 1 Correlation between theory and clinical skill examination.
4th-year | 5th-year | 6th-year | |
---|---|---|---|
Theroy (mean+SD) | 70.6+6.7 | 67.9+6.0 | 70.6+8.0 |
Clinical skill (mean+SD) | 65.5+7.7 | 72.1+6.1 | 69.5+6.0 |
Correlation between theory and clinical skill examination | 0.41* | 0.53* | 0.29** |
* p < 0.001 using Pearson's correlation coefficient
** p < 0.001 using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient
The students’ performance that needed to be improved are clinical skill for 4th year students, theory for 5th year students, and both theory and clinical skill for the 6th year students. The correlation between theory and clinical skill is modest for the 4th and 5th year students but is poor for the 6th year students.
We should consider students’ learning experience and evaluation process in order to improve our students’ summative evaluation performance.