NCME 2008 Presidential Address: The Impact of Anchor Test Configuration on Student Proficiency Rates

Examined in this study were the effects of reducing anchor test length on student proficiency rates for 12 multiple‐choice tests administered in an annual, large‐scale, high‐stakes assessment. The anchor tests contained 15 items, 10 items, or five items. Five content representative samples of items were drawn at each anchor test length from a small universe of items in order to investigate the stability of equating results over anchor test samples. The operational tests were calibrated using the one‐parameter model and equated using the mean b‐value method. The findings indicated that student proficiency rates could display important variability over anchor test samples when 15 anchor items were used. Notable increases in this variability were found for some tests when shorter anchor tests were used. For these tests, some of the anchor items had parameters that changed somewhat in relative difficulty from one year to the next. It is recommended that anchor sets with more than 15 items be used to mitigate the instability in equating results due to anchor item sampling. Also, the optimal allocation method of stratified sampling should be evaluated as one means of improving the stability and precision of equating results.     

Poetry in motion: in search of the poetic in health and physical education

This article uses poetry to show how we might reimagine the body and movement in ways that speak back to and subvert dominant and neoliberal conceptions of health and physical education (HPE). Drawing on the notion of poiesis and Arnold's conceptualisation of physical education as ‘in through and about movement’, I explore possibilities for poetic responses to the body and movement. These responses aim to unearth the emotional and political elements of movement experiences and highlight how much we lose in positioning movement as transactional, and HPE as only justifiable through extrinsic outcomes.     

Family practice clerkship information seminars:the role of the health sciences library

This article will describe the New Jersey Medical School (NJMS) Family Medicine clerkship's Information Seminars for thirdyear medical students, conducted by the faculty and staff of the Department of Family Medicine and by librarians at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey's (UMDNJ) George F. Smith Library of the Health Sciences. Content of the information seminars will be briefly described, as well as the renewed focus on the library through the incorporation of evidence-based medicine concepts into practice.     

What is BioOne?

BioOne is a Web-based aggregation of full-text, high-impact bioscience research journals. Most of its titles are published by small societies or non-commercial publishers and have not been previously available in electronic format. This column describes the BioOne database and gives some basic information about the best ways to search its content.     

Essential Science Indicators

The Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database, published by Thomson Scientific/ISI, presents an array of data that ranks scientists/health professionals, their individual papers, and the journals in which they are published, as well as countries and institutions that perform scientific research. By using this resource, it is possible to prepare ranked statistical lists. The resource covers 6,000 journals published in both the United States and from international publishers. Users should note that ESI covers scientific information in the broadest possible scope, so this is not just limited to biomedical topics and resources.     

ISI's Journal Citation Reports on the Web

This column features an overview of the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database. Basic searching techniques are presented, as well as simple ways to manipulate data contained in the file. The Journal Citation Reports database can provide information on highest impact journals, most frequently used journals, "hottest" journals, and largest journals in a field or discipline.