RESEARCH LIBRARY
RESEARCH LIBRARY
View the latest publications from members of the NBME research team
Academic Medicine: Volume 99 - Issue 3 - p 325-330
This retrospective cohort study investigates the association between United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) scores and outcomes in 196,881 hospitalizations in Pennsylvania over 3 years.
Academic Medicine: Volume 99 - Issue 2 - p 192-197
This report investigates the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) agents, exemplified by ChatGPT, to perform on the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), following reports of its successful performance on sample items.
Academic Medicine: Volume 99 - Issue 7 - Pages 778-783
This study examined score comparability between in-person and remote proctored administrations of the 2020 Internal Medicine In-Training Examination (IM-ITE) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis of data from 27,115 IM residents revealed statistically significant but educationally nonsignificant differences in predicted scores, with slightly larger variations observed for first-year residents. Overall, performance did not substantially differ between the two testing modalities, supporting the continued use of remote proctoring for the IM-ITE amidst pandemic-related disruptions.
Applied Measurement Education: Volume 36, Issue 4, Pages 326-339
This study examines strategies for detecting parameter drift in small-sample equating, crucial for maintaining score comparability in high-stakes exams. Results suggest that methods like mINFIT, mOUTFIT, and Robust-z effectively mitigate drifting anchor items' effects, while caution is advised with the Logit Difference approach. Recommendations are provided for practitioners to manage item parameter drift in small-sample settings.
Advances in Health Sciences Education
Recent advancements enable replacing MCQs with SAQs in high-stakes assessments, but prior research often used small samples under low stakes and lacked time data. This study assesses difficulty, discrimination, and time in a large-scale high-stakes context
Educational Assessment
This study proposes four indices to quantify item influence and distinguishes them from other available item and test measures. We use simulation methods to evaluate and provide guidelines for interpreting each index, followed by a real data application to illustrate their use in practice. We discuss theoretical considerations regarding when influence presents a psychometric concern and other practical concerns such as how the indices function when reducing influence imbalance.
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023), Pages 443-447
This paper presents the ACTA system, which performs automated short-answer grading in the domain of high-stakes medical exams. The system builds upon previous work on neural similarity-based grading approaches by applying these to the medical domain and utilizing contrastive learning as a means to optimize the similarity metric.
Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development: Volume 10
In-training examinations (ITEs) are a popular teaching tool for certification programs. This study examines the relationship between examinees’ performance on the National Commission for Certification of Anesthesiologist Assistants (NCCAA) ITE and the high-stakes NCCAA Certification Examination.
Advancing Natural Language Processing in Educational Assessment
This book examines the use of natural language technology in educational testing, measurement, and assessment. Recent developments in natural language processing (NLP) have enabled large-scale educational applications, though scholars and professionals may lack a shared understanding of the strengths and limitations of NLP in assessment as well as the challenges that testing organizations face in implementation. This first-of-its-kind book provides evidence-based practices for the use of NLP-based approaches to automated text and speech scoring, language proficiency assessment, technology-assisted item generation, gamification, learner feedback, and beyond.
Advancing Natural Language Processing in Educational Assessment: Pages 167-182
This chapter discusses the evolution of natural language processing (NLP) approaches to text representation and how different ways of representing text can be utilized for a relatively understudied task in educational assessment – that of predicting item characteristics from item text.