NBME previews 2025 priorities for supporting medical education and assessment
NBME shared organizational updates at Learn Serve Lead, the Association of American Medical Colleges' 2024 Annual Meeting, in Atlanta, Georgia. This includes plans to expand NBME’s offerings in 2025 with an increased focus on assessment for learning, evaluation of skills and behaviors and equity in medical education.
“NBME recently updated its mission, vision and values to better articulate our role in supporting health care professionals to deliver optimal care for all,” NBME President and CEO Peter J. Katsufrakis, MD, MBA, said. “We have historically met this need through traditional assessment tools. As we look to the future, there are opportunities to expand our assessment of knowledge, skills and behaviors. We believe that NBME can better support the medical education community by offering a greater variety of tools with the ultimate goal of contributing to a highly effective, diverse and compassionate health care workforce.”
NBME evolved its assessment portfolio over the past two years to increase opportunities for student benchmarking, introducing the INSIGHTSSM learner dashboard in 2023 for students to easily view and track their progress over time. In 2024, NBME enhanced the Customized Assessment Services (CAS) offerings to include CAS Practice exams and expanded INSIGHTS to include results from NBME® Self-Assessments, NBME® Subject Examinations, CAS Proctored and CAS Practice exams.
In 2025, NBME will increase its focus on assessments to support learning and growth. The organization plans to expand beyond the traditional high-stakes, summative assessment (known as assessment of learning) to assessments that guide the learner and educator by providing meaningful insights about a student’s skill development (assessment for learning). NBME is leveraging its capabilities in test design, psychometrics and measurement to continue to develop tools that will provide evidence of progress toward clear learning objectives as well as robust feedback to guide continued learning.
“One misconception of assessments for learning is that they are developed with less psychometric rigor than assessments of learning. Although the two assessment types are different in their purposes, the ways that we approach development is the same in terms of prioritizing core psychometric principles like validity and reliability,” NBME Senior Psychometrician Thai Ong, PhD, said. “The key difference is while assessments of learning are typically administered at the end of the learning cycle to evaluate learners’ knowledge, assessments for learning are typically embedded and administered throughout the learning cycle to monitor progression or gaps, with the goal of informing and guiding performance improvement.”
To support this priority, NBME has welcomed visiting scholar Anastasiya Lipnevich, PhD, professor of educational psychology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is providing expertise and executing research to inform and define NBME’s methodology around formative assessment and feedback, as well as to help build more standardized guidelines and frameworks for medical schools to employ this type of assessment. She will be working with the organization through June 2025.
NBME is working on new methods to measure skills and behaviors, such as clinical reasoning and communication skills, recognizing the importance of these skills in providing better patient care.
Over the past two years, NBME convened a Creative Community of 10 medical schools to collaborate on novel approaches to evaluating clinical reasoning skills, a project that yielded actionable learnings about the effectiveness of Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs). NBME plans to continue these collaborations to solve challenges such as content development and technology and delivery solutions. The organization is also going into Phase II of development on its OSCE tools and case development framework based on pilot findings, further investigating automated scoring and measurable feedback. The goal is to develop a scalable, evidence-centered tool to support medical schools in their evaluation of clinical reasoning skills.
In the coming year, NBME will also prioritize methods and tools for evaluating medical learners’ communication skills. Based on 10 years of foundational research, NBME has employed a six-function model of communication that underpins innovations in this area. Additionally, NBME’s research has pointed to the effectiveness of simulations – as authentic, high-fidelity test items – in demonstrating that learners have the complex behaviors and skills needed for medical practice. Earlier this year, NBME announced the acquisition of MedVR Education, an extended reality platform for health care skill development. The acquisition, which took place in January 2024, will elevate NBME’s simulation-based learning capabilities.
Throughout these areas of innovation, NBME continues its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in service of its mission: to advance assessment of health care professionals to achieve optimal care for all. NBME applies DEI principles to its products and services by not only focusing on mitigating bias – such as examining the use of patient characteristics in exam content to ensure inclusion is medically relevant – but also evolving its assessments to disrupt stereotypes and provide more equitable and inclusive opportunities for learners to demonstrate their abilities.
In addition, NBME will continue to advance diversity, equity and inclusion principles by contributing to the medical education field through its support of student scholarships, research grant programs and pathway programs.
“We strive to enhance future physicians’ abilities to treat diverse patient populations by advancing assessment practices, supporting learners and contributing to efforts to have a broadly diverse pipeline of students ready to enter medical school. We also collaborate with like-minded organizations to promote health equity and provide support to medical educators and researchers,” NBME Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer Linda Gadsby, Esq., said. “Through our continued commitment to this work, we aim to create and promote equitable assessments where all learners can demonstrate the knowledge, skills and behaviors to treat a diverse patient population.”
NBME is excited to share more updates in 2025.