医療系分野における汎用的能力の評価方法の検討

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the assessment of generic competences in the field of medical care. Universities are now required to make visible their students' learning outcomes at the program level as well as the course level. Specifically, universities should present their students' abilities as goals of their degree programs and verify to what extent the students have acquired them before graduation, . Commercially available standardized tests are often used as an add-on assessment at the program level in many universities. A typical example of those standardized tests is the Progress Report on Generic Skills (PROG). PROG assesses two types of generic competences: “literacy” and “competency.” On the other hand, in the field of medical care, the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) has been used as an embedded assessment of program-level learning outcomes. OSCE assesses communication with a simulated patient and clinical reasoning, which is a type of problem-solving in the context of medical care. By analyzing the relationship between the results of these two assessments, we examined whether PROG is able to assess generic competences in the field of medical care. No correlation was found between the “competency” of PROG and that of the communication skills tested by OSCE, which were regarded as similar constructs. Similarly, no correlation was observed between the “literacy” of PROG and clinical reasoning skills, despite their conceptual resemblance. Meanwhile, significant correlations were identified between the “competency” of PROG and the personalities of students as measured by a questionnaire survey. It is reasonable to conclude that it is difficult to assess the generic competences and regard them as program-level learning outcomes in the field of medical care by using PROG.