Lydia Timms¹
Elizabeth Hill¹ and Margo Brewer^2,1
1 Curtin University
2 ANZAHPE

Assessment of clinical competence is essential to ensure speech pathology graduates are practice-ready. Accreditation requirements and assessment pedagogy have required universities to shift from a reliance on clinical educator reports of placement competence to include additional standardised assessment of competence. One standardised assessment is an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), which some view as the gold standard of clinical assessments. Student experience significantly impacts their engagement in academic learning and wellbeing so this study reports on the second iteration of an OSCE following implementation of student feedback on a pilot OSCE (the first OSCE in an Australia post- graduate speech pathology course to assess graduate ready competency). 

A mixed method approach was adopted. An anonymous online survey was completed by 15 speech pathology students (45% of cohort) at the end of their course and 11 examiners (95% of cohort). Participants rated a series of statements designed to capture their experience with the assessment on a 5-point Likert scale . They were asked to respond qualitatively to two questions to further explore their experience. 

Despite high levels of anxiety, most students reported understanding the purpose of the OSCE, embraced the assessment as a learning opportunity, and could see the value of this assessment in their course. However, students did not see the OSCEs as reflecting real life practice and were equivocal about the fairness of this assessment type. Their qualitative responses reflected similar sentiments with expansion on points related to a) authenticity, b) emotions/experience and c) learning and logistics. 

Examiners, who were all new to marking OSCEs, provided positive ratings for all items, excluding statements related to clarity of marking guides. 

This assessment type remains embedded in the course with updates to examiner training, student preparedness and the authenticity of the simulated client and clinical scenario. 

References (maximum three) 

Hill, E., Timms, L., Brewer, M., (under final review). A pilot study of Objective Structured Clinical Examinations in a postgraduate speech pathology program. Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology. 

Quigley, D., & Regan, J. (2021). Introduction of the objective structured clinical examination in speech and language therapy education: student perspectives. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, 73(4), 316-325. 

Yap, K., Sheen, J., Nedeljkovic, M., Milne, L., Lawrence, K., & Hay, M. (2021). Assessing clinical competencies using the objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) in psychology training. Clinical Psychologist, 25(3), 260-270.