Assessing students' communication and interpersonal skills across evaluation settings.

Medical students’ interpersonal and communication skills are a fundamental dimension of their clinical competence. These skills refer to the ability to communicate and interact with patients in a clinical setting. Such skills are often evaluated during the clerkship Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) or other clinical performance-based examinations that simulate a patient encounter. In these examinations, students interact with a standardized patient (SP) to demonstrate their abilities in history taking, conducting a physical examination, and applying interpersonal and communication skills for providing tasks such as counseling, breaking bad news, etc. Faculty observers, using standardized checklists, may rate the students’ performance during these encounters, including the interpersonal and communication skill aspects of their performance. Often, SPs also evaluate and provide feedback to students about their communication and interpersonal skills during the encounter. In addition to assessing students’ clinical competence during clerkship OSCEs, many US medical schools are now administering fourth-year clinical performance examinations to assess students’ clinical skills prior to graduation. These exams also provide an opportunity for the assessment of students’ communication and interpersonal skills. Given the anticipated US Medical Licensure Examination (USMLE) Standardized Patient Examination for all US medical school graduates, assessment of students’ clinical competence through clerkship OSCEs and fourth-year clinical performance examinations provides both medical schools and students important evaluation feedback. If students’ communication and interpersonal skills improve or decline during the third year, such change could have important implications for students’ performance on a fourth-year, high-stakes clinical examination. If third-year performance examinations can predict performance on a fourth-year, highAssessing Students’ Communication and Interpersonal Skills Across Evaluation Settings