Addressing the theory-practice gap in assessment

Excerpt

This issue of Perspectives on Medical Education contains a thought-provoking article by Young, Cummings & St-Onge, looking specifically at the stability of difficulty and discrimination indices when calculated for small samples of students. They concluded that difficulty and discrimination scores calculated based upon small samples are not stable across cohorts and therefore should be interpreted with caution [1]. Given our mutual experiences in roles that seek to implement theoretically-based and research-informed assessment practices, this article prompted us to think about assessment processes as a whole. We believe holistic review of assessment processes and practices is foundational to generating meaningful interpretations of individual metrics, such as difficulty and discrimination indices. In this commentary, we argue that assessment research would benefit from improved integration of theory and practice. …