title: Effectiveness of an occupational and environmental medicine curriculum as indicated by evaluation of medical student performance on an objective structured clinical examination.
abstract: Medical students must learn to recognize occupational and environmental-related illness. An occupational and environmental medicine curriculum can achieve this goal. The curriculum must be evaluated to ensure that medical students are learning to recognize exposure-related health conditions and to evaluate if this ability correlates with medical interviewing skills. A case, formatted for an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), was developed to evaluate student performance on an exposure-related clinical problem. The OSCE results were analyzed to identify the areas that differentiated the students who recognized an exposure-related medical condition from those who did not. We conclude that an OSCE is an effective curriculum evaluation tool to assess whether a core occupational and environmental-related curriculum is contributing to student learning in exposure history-taking and associated clinical reasoning skills.
authors.affiliation: Department of Family Medicine, Wayne State University, Detroit, Mich. 48201, USA.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schenk
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Popp
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bridge
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Gallagher
authors.forename: E R
authors.initials: ER
authors.lastname: Petrusa
authors.forename: R R
authors.initials: RR
authors.lastname: Frank
mesh_terms: D002983:Clinical Competence; D003479:Curriculum; D004504:Education, Medical, Undergraduate; D004521:Educational Measurement / Q000379:methods*; D018876:Environmental Illness / Q000175:diagnosis*; D019550:Environmental Medicine / Q000193:education*; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008487:Medical History Taking / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards*; D008824:Michigan; D009784:Occupational Diseases / Q000175:diagnosis*; D009787:Occupational Medicine / Q000193:education*; D010808:Physical Examination