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Benchmarking by cross-institutional comparison of student achievement in a progress test.
- Source :
-
Medical Education . Jan2008, Vol. 42 Issue 1, p82-88. 7p. 2 Graphs. - Publication Year :
- 2008
-
Abstract
- Objective To determine the effectiveness of single-point benchmarking and longitudinal benchmarking for inter-school educational evaluation. Methods We carried out a mixed, longitudinal, cross-sectional study using data from 24 annual measurement moments (4 tests × 6 year groups) over 4 years for 4 annual progress tests assessing the graduation-level knowledge of all students from 3 co-operating medical schools. Participants included undergraduate medical students (about 5000) from 3 medical schools. The main outcome measures involved between-school comparisons of progress test results based on different benchmarking methods. Results Variations in relative school performance across different tests and year groups indicate instability and low reliability of single-point benchmarking, which is subject to distortions as a result of school-test and year group-test interaction effects. Deviations of school means from the overall mean follow an irregular, noisy pattern obscuring systematic between-school differences. The longitudinal benchmarking method results in suppression of noise and revelation of systematic differences. The pattern of a school’s cumulative deviations per year group gives a credible reflection of the relative performance of year groups. Conclusions Even with highly comparable curricula, single-point benchmarking can result in distortion of the results of comparisons. If longitudinal data are available, the information contained in a school’s cumulative deviations from the overall mean can be used. In such a case, the mean test score across schools is a useful benchmark for cross-institutional comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 03080110
- Volume :
- 42
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Medical Education
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 27968255
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2007.02896.x