Elizabeth Kachur¹
Thanakorn (TJ) Jirasevijinda², Nobutaro Ban³, Maryam Karbasi Motlagh⁴, Rashmi Kusurkar⁵, Gabrielle Leite Silveira⁶, Richard Wu⁷, Kevin Eva, Peter de Jong⁸, Pat Lilley⁹ and Ronnie Harden⁹
1 Medical Education Development, Global Consulting
2 Weill Cornell College of Medicine
3 Aichi Medical University
4 Tehran University of Medical Sciences
5 Vrije University
6 University of San Paulo
7 Zhejiang Chinese Medical University
8 IAMSE
91

Background
Health professions educators around the globe are committed to producing formative and summative assessments which are valid, reliable, feasible and perceived as fair by all stakeholders. Quality work is going on everywhere, but innovations and research results are not always disseminated world-wide; in fact, most publications on assessment originate from English-speaking Western countries. One major problem lies in the fact that papers which are not published in English will have a limited readership and distribution. This symposium will provide some examples from Brazil, China, Iran and Japan to illustrate what those who do not speak those native languages would be missing. Jointly we will discuss causes for this problem and brainstorm potential solutions to help our field move forward more inclusively. 

Why is the Topic Important? 

A simple 1952-2023 PubMed search using “assessment” and “medical education” as prompts resulted in 165,051 articles. When filtering the results for “English” the number is reduced to 160,830 publications. This leaves 4,221 articles which may be lost for much of the global health professions community of practice. Bibliometric studies show a maldistribution of articles with the majority coming from the “Global North” which includes economically more developed countries (e.g., North America, Europe, Australia) and a much smaller portion from the “Global South” (e.g., Latin America, Africa, and many Asian countries). Maggio et al. (2022)reviewed24medicaleducationjournalsandanalyzedtheoriginsofauthors. TheGlobal South contributed only 11.4% of the 62,708 total number of authors, which clearly presents an equity issue. To reach its full potential medical education and the assessment community need to develop new strategies to become more inclusive and prevent the loss of valuable contributions to the field. As Kusurkar RA argues we need to stop the “leaky pipeline of knowledge generation in medical education.” 

Thesessionwillstartoffwithabriefdescriptionoftheproblem. Theparticipantswillbepolled to elicit their perceptions and experiences with the issue at hand (20 min). To illustrate what is being missed due to the lack of inclusivity 4 presenters will each summarize 2 important assessment-related articles that were published only in their language of origin (40 min). The last part of the symposium will be used for general discussion and for brainstorming solutions. Again, to generate active discussion, we will use polling to query all participants about their plans moving forward (30 min). 

References (maximum three)