ABSTRACT
Fifth-year medical students at the Yamaguchi University School of Medicine must pass an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) before beginning bedside learning. Because the OSCE is performed over 3 days, examinees on later days are suspected of having an advantage over those tested on early days. In this study, mean values for each day's scores by one examiner were statistically compared in stations of the medical interview to investigate the difference in scores obtained on each of the OSCE days. In addition, for stations at which one student was evaluated by two examiners, their scores for each student were compared statistically in the same manner. We found no significant day-todaydifferences in mean values of the scores over the 3 examination days. However, significant differences were found between the two examiners' scores in 2 of 3 stations for the medical interview. Although there were no differences in scores among participants during the 3-day communication OSCE, examiner's evaluations and formats should be standardized for OSCE stations.
ABSTRACT
We introduced active educational methods in medical ethics education and evaluated their effect on medical students. Three methods were used: 1) small-group discussion to clarify the clinical ethical issues, 2) self-study to analyze examples of doctors' explanations to patients, and 3) self-study with videotapes to recognize informed consent. We asked students to write a report on each subject of the three studies. Before grading their reports, we determined a standard answer for each subject and marked their reports according to an absolute standard. We found the mean value and standard error of the students' scores in study 1 were significantly higher than those in study 2 or 3. These results suggest that small-group discussion is an effective educational method and useful in the analysis of clinical ethical issues.