%0 Journal Article
%T Self-perceived competence correlates poorly with objectively measured competence in Evidence Based Medicine among medical students
%A Nai Lai
%A Cheong Teng
%J BMC Medical Education
%D 2011
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1472-6920-11-25
%X We recruited a group of medical students in their final six months of training between March and August 2006. The students were receiving a clinically-integrated EBM training program within their curriculum. We evaluated the students' self-perceived competence in two EBM domains ("searching for evidence" and "appraising the evidence") by piloting a questionnaire containing 16 relevant items, and objectively assessed their competence in EBM using an adapted version of the Fresno test, a validated tool. We correlated the matching components between our questionnaire and the Fresno test using Pearson's product-moment correlation.Forty-five out of 72 students in the cohort (62.5%) participated by completing the questionnaire and the adapted Fresno test concurrently. In general, our students perceived themselves as moderately competent in most items of the questionnaire. They rated themselves on average 6.34 out of 10 (63.4%) in "searching" and 44.41 out of 57 (77.9%) in "appraising". They scored on average 26.15 out of 60 (43.6%) in the "searching" domain and 57.02 out of 116 (49.2%) in the "appraising" domain in the Fresno test. The correlations between the students' self-rating and their performance in the Fresno test were poor in both the "searching" domain (r = 0.13, p = 0.4) and the "appraising" domain (r = 0.24, p = 0.1).This study provides supporting evidence that at the undergraduate level, self-perceived competence in EBM, as measured using our questionnaire, does not correlate well with objectively assessed EBM competence measured using the adapted Fresno test.International Medical University, Malaysia, research ID: IMU 110/06Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) has been incorporated into the curricula of many medical schools over the past two decades. Teaching learning activities and assessments in EBM are mainly based on the clearly defined domains of asking answerable clinical questions, searching for evidence, appraising the evidence and applying the evidence [1]
%K Evidence Based Medicine
%K assessment
%K undergraduate
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/11/25