title: Assessing Medical Student Professionalism: An Analysis of a Peer Assessment.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Students' professional development is an essential aim of medical school. The purpose of this paper is to report how an assessment of first-year medical students' professional behavior was designed and to investigate its measurement characteristics.
  
  
  METHODS
  The assessment was implemented as a peer assessment of professional skills, which were delineated according to a formal professional code developed by our curriculum committee. During the last week of the Fall 2005 semester, the professionalism assessment was administered online to students in a problem-based learning course.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The internal consistency of the assessment is adequate. The generalizability study found that raters nested within persons accounted for the majority of variance. While the inter-rater reliability is relatively low, using multiple raters may yield an acceptable estimate of the relative reliability.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The results suggest that this peer assessment is a practical assessment, evidenced by the 91% compliance rate. However, future research and modifications will be needed to address the variance of responses, helping to discriminate between "poor" and "good" observations of professionalism. In addition, multiple raters are required to supply reliable estimates of students' professional behavior. Coupling this evaluation with other professionalism evaluations may help reveal a more complete picture of students' professional behavior.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Community Medicine and the Office of Medical Education . West Virginia University.
authors.forename: Scott
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Cottrell
authors.affiliation: b School of Human Resources and Education . West Virginia University.
authors.forename: Sebastian
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Diaz
authors.affiliation: c Student Services. West Virginia University.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cather
authors.affiliation: d Medical Education. West Virginia University.
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Shumway
keywords: Ethics/professionalism; Evaluation; PBL; Peer Assessment; Problem Based Learning