Next month, the largest medical education conference in North America will take place in Denver, Colorado, and the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) will be there. In fact, researcher Andrea Gingerich will give the only review paper presentation of the conference.

Gingerich, a researcher in the Northern Medical Program (NMP) at UNBC, is presenting her work, which suggests ways to explain differences in medical educators’ judgments of student performance. The work was also published in the most recent edition of the journal Academic Medicine. The journal and conference are organized by the American Association of Medical Colleges, an influential body in the way medical programs are taught. 

Gingerich examines “rater-based” testing, where a student is asked to carry out a task in front of an expert judge or panel of judges, who then rate the performance. “In medical education, students need to both ‘show it’ and ‘know it’,” says Gingerich, who is carrying out the research as part of her PhD thesis through Maastricht University. “The rater-based assessment is a fundamental way medical educators test the skills of students. Even those applying for a medical license are subject to this testing. The problem is that raters are asked to make subjective judgments, which leave them open to charges of bias.”

Gingerich points to the judges of a figure skating competition as an example of a rater-based system. “Why do five experts in their field look at the same performance and come up with differing assessments?” asks Gingerich. “I’m using social cognition literature to examine why humans rate the same performance differently.”

One of the reasons for different ratings is that humans tend to categorize. “We unconsciously categorize everything that catches our eye: male, female, dog, bear. People have different reactions depending on past experiences,” explains G. “So during a performance evaluation of a medical procedure, one rater’s ‘slow and deliberate’ might be another’s ‘fearful and hesitant.' That can lead to rating variability.”

“If we understood cognitive processes better, we could design an assessment system that takes better advantage of the way people think and addresses our limitations,” says Gingerich. “It may be that our rating systems right now don’t fit the way humans actually think and could use some improvement.”

Gingerich came to the Northern Medical Program at UNBC after practicing as a naturopathic doctor in the small town of Seaforth, Ontario. “I was working in the NMP as a problem-based learning tutor when I became interested in medical education,” says Gingerich, who later obtained a master’s degree in the subject from the University of Dundee in Scotland. “The NMP is a really supportive environment and it has been wonderful for my education and career. I’m looking forward to sharing some of the work I’ve done in the North with an international audience.”

Gingerich will be doing a dress-rehearsal of the presentation at noon on Monday October 31 in room 9-235 with everyone welcome to attend.