1. Use of Sociodemographic Information in Clinical Vignettes of Multiple-Choice Questions for Preclinical Medical Students.
- Author
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Carey-Ewend K, Feinberg A, Flen A, Williamson C, Gutierrez C, Cykert S, Beck Dallaghan GL, and Gilliland KO
- Abstract
Purpose: This paper aims to characterize the use of demographic data in multiple-choice questions from a commercial preclinical question bank and determine if there is appropriate use of different distractors., Background: Multiple-choice questions for medical students often include vignettes describing a patient's presentation to help guide students to a diagnosis, but overall patterns of usage between different types of nonmedical patient information in question stems have yet to be determined., Methods: Three hundred eighty of 453 randomly selected questions were included for analysis after determining they contained a clinical vignette and required a diagnosis. The vignettes and following explanations were then examined for the presence/absence of 11 types of demographic information, including age, sex/gender, and socioeconomic status. We compared both the usage frequency and relevance between the 11 information types., Results: Most information types were present in less than 10% of clinical vignettes, but age and sex/gender were present in over 95% of question stems. Over 50% of questions included irrelevant information about age and sex/gender, but 75% of questions did not include any irrelevant information of other types. Patient weight and environmental exposures were significantly more likely to be relevant than age or sex/gender., Discussion: Students using the questions in this study will frequently gain practice incorporating age and sex/gender into their clinical reasoning while receiving little exposure to other demographic information. Based on our findings, we posit that questions could include more irrelevant information, outside age and sex/gender, to better approximate real clinical scenarios and ensure students do not overvalue certain demographic data., Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40670-023-01778-z., Competing Interests: Conflict of InterestThe authors declare no competing interests., (© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to International Association of Medical Science Educators 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.)
- Published
- 2023
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