title: Developing, evaluating and validating a scoring rubric for written case reports.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The purpose of this study was to evaluate Family Medicine Clerkship students' writing skills using an anchored scoring rubric. In this study, we report on the assessment of a current scoring rubric (SR) used to grade written case description papers (CDP) for medical students, describe the development of a revised SR with examination of scoring consistency among faculty raters, and report on feedback from students regarding SR revisions and written CDP.
  
  
  METHODS
  Five faculty members scored a total of eighty-three written CDP using both the Original SR (OSR) and the Revised SR1 (RSR1) during the 2009-2010 academic years.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Overall increased faculty inter-rater reliability was obtained using the RSR1. Additionally, this subset analysis revealed that the five faculty using the Revised SR2 (RSR2) had a high measure of inter-rater reliability on their scoring of this subset of papers (as measured by intra-class correlation (ICC) with ICC = 0.93, p = 0.001.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Findings from this research have implications for medical education, by highlighting the importance of the assessment and development of reliable evaluation tools for medical student writing projects.
authors.affiliation: Department of Family Medicine, Maine Medical Center, Portland, Maine, USA.
authors.forename: Peggy R
authors.initials: PR
authors.lastname: Cyr
authors.affiliation: Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, Maine Medical Center, Portland, Maine, USA.
authors.forename: Kahsi A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Education, University of New England, College of Osteopathic Medicine, Biddeford, Maine, USA.
authors.forename: India L
authors.initials: IL
authors.lastname: Broyles
authors.affiliation: Department of Family Medicine, Maine Medical Center, Portland, Maine, USA.
authors.forename: Christina T
authors.initials: CT
authors.lastname: Holt
mesh_terms: D002982:Clinical Clerkship; D004521:Educational Measurement / Q000379:methods; D005194:Family Practice / Q000193:education*; D006801:Humans; D015588:Observer Variation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013337:Students, Medical; D014956:Writing / Q000592:standards*
keywords: Scoring rubric; medical student evaluation