Formative and Summative OSCE Assessment of Head and Skull Examination

At the end of the module, the students who agreed to be videotaped participated in a formative videotaped assessment in the context of an OSCE station. The examination was performed on a standardized patient and was recorded. Afterwards the videos were shown to two examiners who were blinded with regards to the group assignment. They assessed the performance of the students with the standardized checklist (Additional file 2) used for head and skull examinations. The checklist is used in OSCE’s since 2007 and has been described previously [31 ]. The validation process of the checklist has been presented on the annual congress of the DGMKG (german society for cranio-maxillofacial surgeons) in 2009. The examiners were a second year resident (i.e., at the beginning of clinical training) and an attending doctor in the Department of CMF-Surgery. Both examiners rated the video material in an independent manner and assessed the students according to the OSCE checklist.
Four months after the skills lab week and the internship, the surgical OSCE took place as an obligatory final exam (summative).
Videotaping the entire exam was not possible since all students did not agree to being videotaped. For this reason, two examiners were at the head & skull examination of the OSCE station and rated the students. One examiner was an attending doctor in the Department of CMF-Surgery, the other examiner was an attending doctor in a related surgical discipline. These examiners were not members of the faculty and were also blinded with regards to group assignment. All raters participated in the mandatory examiner training at the faculty, which consists of a 30 min online tutorial and a 30 min simulation of a video rating.
Furthermore, we requested the time and the way of preparation the students prepared for the final OSCE exam referring to the head & skull examination, with a structured questionnaire.