Portfolio assessment during medical internships: How to obtain a reliable and feasible assessment procedure?
BACKGROUND
A portfolio is used to mentor and assess students' clinical performance at the workplace. However, students and raters often perceive the portfolio as a time-consuming instrument.


OBJECTIVE
In this study, we investigated whether assessment during medical internship by a portfolio can combine reliability and feasibility.


METHODS
The domain-oriented reliability of 61 double-rated portfolios was measured, using a generalisability analysis with portfolio tasks and raters as sources of variation in measuring the performance of a student.


RESULTS
We obtained reliability (Phi coefficient) of 0.87 with this internship portfolio containing 15 double-rated tasks. The generalisability analysis showed that an acceptable level of reliability (Phi = 0.80) was maintained when the amount of portfolio tasks was decreased to 13 or 9 using one and two raters, respectively.


CONCLUSIONS
Our study shows that a portfolio can be a reliable method for the assessment of workplace learning. The possibility of reducing the amount of tasks or raters while maintaining a sufficient level of reliability suggests an increase in feasibility of portfolio use for both students and raters.
Michels
Nele R M
NR
University of Antwerp, Belgium. nele.michels@ua.ac.be
Driessen
Erik W
EW
Muijtjens
Arno M M
AM
Van Gaal
Luc F
LF
Bossaert
Leo L
LL
De Winter
Benedicte Y
BY
D001530:Belgium; D002983:Clinical Competence / Q000592:standards*; D004503:Education, Medical, Graduate / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006801:Humans; D007396:Internship and Residency; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D017132:Workplace