The core content of emergency medical services medicine.

On September 23, 2010, the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) approved emergency medical services (EMS) as a subspecialty of emergency medicine. As a result, the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) is planning to award the first certificates in EMS medicine in the fall of 2013. The purpose of subspecialty certification in EMS, as defined by ABEM, is to standardize physician training and qualifications for EMS practice, to improve patient safety and enhance the quality of emergency medical care provided to patients in the prehospital environment, and to facilitate integration of prehospital patient treatment into the continuum of patient care. In February 2011, ABEM established the EMS Examination Task Force to develop the Core Content of EMS Medicine (Core Content) that would be used to define the subspecialty and from which questions would be written for the examinations, to develop a blueprint for the examinations, and to develop a bank of test questions for use on the examinations. The Core Content defines the training parameters, resources, and knowledge of the treatment of prehospital patients necessary to practice EMS medicine. Additionally, it is intended to inform fellowship directors and candidates for certification of the full range of content that might appear on the examinations. This article describes the development of the Core Content and presents the Core Content in its entirety.

Evaluating the Impact of Releasing an Item Pool on a Test's Empirical Characteristics.

Protecting the security of examination questions is an important task for high-stakes examining boards/agencies and university programs. To maintain the security of questions, examining boards and university programs use a combination of prevention, detection, and enforcement strategies. A common prevention strategy is to establish a number of controls on access to questions; however, restricting access can motivate examinees to try harder to reconstruct questions that may appear on future versions of the test. Moreover, access to study materials by some groups and not others can present a challenge to the fairness of examinations. The aim of this study was to evaluate the empirical stability of test characteristics. Specifically, the primary research objective was to investigate the empirical stability of the items and test forms of a written examination before and after a specific policy decision was implemented. As a response to both of these concerns, this article describes a study that evaluated how psychometric (i.e., statistical) properties of test forms and individual questions might be affected by publicly releasing a larger number of questions from an item question pool. A series of analyses were conducted, including item drift to evaluate stability of the characteristics. The results suggest that empirical characteristics of the test forms and individual questions have remained relatively stable since the release policy was implemented. Specifically, statistical properties of the test forms have continued to perform similarly to test forms that were constructed prior to the release. Although the results of this study were promising, the context of this specific testing program may have offered additional protections such as a limited number of administrations that others may not. Therefore, testing/examining agencies and university programs may want to consider this strategy with appropriate caution.