Milton Severo, a researcher at the Instituto de Saúde Pública da Universidade do Porto (ISPUP) and professor at the Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade do Porto (FMUP), was the winner of the U.Porto 2019 Pedagogical Excellence Award for a work in the area of medical education, which sought to standardize the evaluation of a FMUP curricular unit through the implementation of structured objective clinical exams.
The award was presented to the team responsible for promoting the project, to which Milton Severo belongs, on March 22nd (the day of the Universidade do Porto) by the President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
Entitled “Implementation of Objective Structured Clinical Examination in the transition to clinical teaching: the challenge of innovation in a traditional context, towards pedagogical excellence”, the work was developed within the scope of the curricular unit of Medical Propaedeutics of the Cycle of Master Degree in Medicine of FMUP.
“In this discipline, there were many complaints at the level of the evaluation because it was not standardized. Our team sought to create a model that would reduce the subjectivity of classical assessment and the inherent variability in grading”, explains the researcher.
For the first time, an evaluation model was introduced in which students are evaluated for obtaining the clinical history and carrying out an objective examination in trained-patients (contracted actors), being graded by multiple evaluators according to structured criteria. “We sought to introduce a fairer evaluation method that would reduce the subjectivity of grading. Students are now exposed to the same clinical cases for assessment purposes and scored according to the same instrument”, says Milton Severo.
Implemented in the academic year 2018-2019, the model managed to win over the students. “The students were clearly more satisfied with this type of assessment compared to what existed previously. We think that this aspect is relevant, because the students know that they will have a fair classification and that, therefore, it pays to study. The maximum ‘Assessment drives Learning’ applies here”, he says.
The team, composed by Pedro Grilo Diogo, João Sérgio Neves, José Gerardo Oliveira, Maria Amélia Ferreira and Milton Severo, intends to extend this model to other curricular units at FMUP.
In 2003, U.Porto started the E-learning@UP pilot project and in 2012, the U.Porto e-learning Excellence Award evolved into the U.Porto Pedagogical Excellence Award with the purpose of distinguishing, promoting and disseminating educational models of excellence that meet the current pedagogical challenges.
About Milton Severo:
Milton Severo is a researcher at the Epidemiology Research Unit (EPIUnit) of ISPUP and Head of Health Metrics Unit of the Institute. He is an Assistant professor, Biostatistician, Psychometrician and Senior Researcher at Department of Public Health and Forensic Sciences, and Medical Education of FMUP, where he is responsible for the Meta-Evaluation Office. This is the third time he has won the U.Porto Excellence Award.
