Keywords: Assessment, Health Professions Education, Education, Cognition

“When numbers become words: Assessors’ processing of performance data within OSCEs’”

Performance-based assessment is fundamental component of health training programs. Assessors must observe, process, and interpret performance information, in order to arrive at judgements of student competency. Assessors tend to vary in these decisions. This PhD thesis addressed this problem by investigating how assessors process communication performance data and how the use of narrative assessment comments may aid assessment procedures. Findings showed assessor characteristics, such as cultural orientations and individual perspectives, may influence how assessors process and bring meaning to performance data. It was also found that communication scores based on narrative assessment comments appear may offer the same quality of decisions, as scores based on direct performance observation.  This thesis concludes that assessors are instrumental to performance assessment and must be central to any intervention aimed to improve assessment quality.