Kozato, An;
Patel, Nimesh;
Shikino, Kiyoshi;
(2020)
A randomised controlled pilot trial of the influence of non-native English accents on examiners’ scores in OSCEs.
BMC Medical Education
, 20
(1)
, Article 268. 10.1186/s12909-020-02198-y.
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Abstract
Background: Objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) are important aspects of assessment in medical education. There is anecdotal evidence suggesting that students with non-native English accents (NNEA) may be subjected to unconscious bias. It is imperative to minimise the examiners’ bias so that the difference in the scores reflects students’ clinical competence. Research shows NNEAs can cause stereotyping, often leading to the speaker being negatively judged. However, no medical education study has looked at the influence of NNEAs in assessment. Methods: This is a randomized, single-blinded controlled trial. Four videos of one mock OSCE station were produced. A professional actor played a medical student. Two near identical scripts were prepared. Two videos showed the actor speaking with an Indian accent and two videos showed the actor speaking without the accent in either script. Forty-two OSCE examiners in the United Kingdom (UK) were recruited and randomly assigned to two groups. They watched two videos online, each with either script, each with a different script. One video with a NNEA and one video was without. Checklist item scores were analysed with descriptive statistics and non-parametric independent samples median test. Global scores were analysed with descriptive statistics and Mann-Whitney test. Results: Thirty-two examiners completed the study. The average scores for the checklist items (41.6 points) did not change when the accent variable was changed. Independent samples median test showed no statistically significant relationship between the accent and the scores (p = 0.787). For the global scores received by the videos with the NNEA, there were one less ‘Good’ grade and one more ‘Fail’ grade compared to those without the NNEA. Mann-Whitney test on global score showed lower scores for videos with NNEA (p = 0.661). Conclusions: Examiners were not biased either positively or negatively towards NNEAs when providing checklist or global scores. Further study is required to validate the findings of this study. More discussion is warranted to consider how the accent should be considered in current medical education assessment. Registration: Trial registration completed trial, ID: ISRCTN17360102, Retrospectively registered on 15/04/2020.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | A randomised controlled pilot trial of the influence of non-native English accents on examiners’ scores in OSCEs |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1186/s12909-020-02198-y |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-020-02198-y |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
| Keywords: | OSCE, Stereotypes, Bias, Language, Accent, Examiner, Clinical competence, |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Medical Sciences > UCL Medical School |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10182305 |
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