Professor Clarence Kreiter will take up the position of Fulbright Scholar in RCSI on 2 February for a three-month period.

Professor Kreiter is currently a Professor at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. He works primarily within the Office of Consultation and Research in Medical Education (OCRME) which involves a wide range of research consultation and performs many education functions at the medical college.

Professor Kreiter has a doctorate in quantitative psychology, measurement and statistics. He serves on editorial boards for three medical education journals and has published on topics related to innovative cognitive and clinical skills assessment designs, statistical selection methods, research design, simulation, Bayesian reasoning, generalisability theory, and validity generalisation. Professor Kreiter also consults on research design and statistics. He teaches graduate level courses on educational measurement and education assessment in medical education.

The proposed Fulbright assignment will involve research and development of both traditional and computer-based simulation assessment methods as well as a teaching collaboration with the RCSI graduate program in Health Professions Education. Reliable and valid scoring of responses to computer-based simulations represents a crucial step in developing a useful performance-based assessment of clinical reasoning.

There has been relatively little research aimed at design features that are capable of maximising both psychometric and learning outcomes. This represents a key challenge in incorporating this technology within the medical school. RCSI has an active faculty interest in this topic and can provide an opportunity to both learn from current insights and to share statistical techniques that were developed at UICOM for simulations in diagnostic laboratory testing (LabCAPS) that are aimed at both instruction and assessment of clinical reasoning.