Volume 32, Issue 1 (2-2018)                   Med J Islam Repub Iran 2018 | Back to browse issues page


XML Print


Center for Educational Research in Medical Sciences, School of Medicine, & Department of Medical Education, School of Medicine, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. , zo_sohrabi@yahoo.com
Abstract:   (5662 Views)
Background: Clinical reasoning plays an important role in the accurate diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Script Concordance test (SCT) is one of the tools that assess clinical reasoning skill. This study was conducted to determine the reliability and concurrent and predictive validity of SCT in assessing final lessons and gynecology exams of undergraduate midwifery students.
   Methods: At first, 20 clinical scenarios followed by 3 questions were designed by 2 experienced midwives. Then, after examining the content validity, 15 scenarios were selected. The test was used for 55 midwifery students. The correlation of SCT results with grade point average (GPA) was measured. To evaluate the concurrent validity of SCT, the correlation between SCT scores and the final exam of the gynecology course was measured. To measure predictive validity, the correlation of SCT scores with comprehensive exams of midwifery was calculated. Data were analyzed using SPSS software. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and coefficient Cronbach's alpha were used for analysis. The test’s item difficulty level (IDL) and item discriminative index (IDI) were determined using Whitney and Sabers’ method.
   Results: The internal reliability of the test (calculated using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient) was 0.74. All questions were positively correlated with the total score. The highest correlation coefficient was related to GPA and comprehensive test with the score of 0.91. The correlation coefficient between SCT and the final test (concurrent validity) was 0.654, and the correlation coefficient between SCT and comprehensive test (predictive validity) was 0.721. The range of item discriminative index and item difficulty level in this exam was 0.39-0.59 and 0.32-0.66, respectively.
   Conclusion: SCT shows a relatively high internal validity and can predict the success rate of students in the comprehensive exams of midwifery. Also, it showed a high concurrent validity in the final test of gynecology course. This test could be a good alternative for formative and summative tests of clinical courses. 
 
 
Full-Text [PDF 429 kb]   (1019 Downloads)    
Type of Study: Original Research | Subject: Clinical Reasoning

Rights and permissions
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.