title: Assessing students' communication skills: validation of a global rating.
abstract: Communication skills training is an accepted part of undergraduate medical programs nowadays. In addition to learning experiences its importance should be emphasised by performance-based assessment. As detailed checklists have been shown to be not well suited for the assessment of communication skills for different reasons, this study aimed to validate a global rating scale. A Canadian instrument was translated to German and adapted to assess students' communication skills during an end-of-semester-OSCE. Subjects were second and third year medical students at the reformed track of the Charité-Universitaetsmedizin Berlin. Different groups of raters were trained to assess students' communication skills using the global rating scale. Validity testing included concurrent validity and construct validity: Judgements of different groups of raters were compared to expert ratings as a defined gold standard. Furthermore, the amount of agreement between scores obtained with this global rating scale and a different instrument for assessing communication skills was determined. Results show that communication skills can be validly assessed by trained non-expert raters as well as standardised patients using this instrument.
authors.affiliation: Reformstudiengang Medizin, Charité-Universitaetsmedizin Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, 10117, Berlin, Germany. simone.scheffer@charite.de
authors.forename: Simone
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Scheffer
authors.forename: Isabel
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Muehlinghaus
authors.forename: Annette
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Froehmel
authors.forename: Heiderose
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ortwein
mesh_terms: D002983:Clinical Competence; D003142:Communication; D004504:Education, Medical, Undergraduate / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D004521:Educational Measurement / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D006801:Humans; D018794:Problem-Based Learning / Q000379:methods; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013337:Students, Medical; D014177:Translations