May in this issue

Abstract

Despite growing discussion, equity in assessment within medical education remains ambiguous. This paper aims to enrich the dialogue by critically reviewing three distinct orientations toward equity: fairness-oriented assessment, assessment for inclusion and justice-oriented assessment. Each orientation is examined for its unique assumptions, methods and resulting advantages and disadvantages. The authors argue that advancing equity requires educators to clearly identify their orientations, select aligned methods and tools and explore alternative perspectives.

Kakara Anderson, H, Govaerts, M, Abdulla, L, Balmer, D, Busari, JO, West, D. Clarifying and Expanding Equity in Assessment by Considering Three Orientations: Fairness, Inclusion, and Justice. Med Educ. 2025;59(5):494-502. doi: 10.1111/medu.15534.

Inclusive teaching practice ensures health care and medical students are adequately prepared for practice with a diverse population. Inclusion of volunteer patients is a significant part of preparing students for practice. This qualitative study explored the perspectives of GP tutors regarding recruiting diverse volunteer patients. While participants acknowledge the importance of ensuring medical students have diverse clinical experience, most did not actively think about the diversity of the patients they were recruiting. Instead, they concentrated on course curriculum and teaching requirements. This article offers a range of suggested recommendations and solutions to facilitate the recruitment of diverse patients in medical education.

Mohammad, M, Tyson, L, Bryant, P, Patel, P, Young, R, Semlyen, J. Factors Influencing the Inclusion of Diverse Volunteer Patients within Medical Student Primary Care Placements. Med Educ. 2025;59(5):531-539. doi: 10.1111/medu.15562.

This critical review examines empirical and theoretical work from within and outside the health professions education literature to describe what and how physicians-in-training learn from interacting with other health professionals. It describes how these brief, spontaneous, informal interactions contribute both to developing physician competencies including, but not limited to, collaboration. This learning reflects a complex interplay of individual, social and situated factors, which this review unifies into a cohesive model as well as an illustrative example to help make the theoretical more practical.

Miller, K, Ilgen, J, de Bruin, A, Pusic, M, Stalmeijer, R. Physician Development through Interprofessional Workplace Interactions: A Critical Review. Med Educ. 2025;59(5):484-493. doi: 10.1111/medu.15564.

This study examines whether the clinical information clinicians use during diagnosis differs between correct and incorrect diagnoses. Clinicians diagnosed written cases accompanied by a suggested likely diagnosis, which was correct in half of the cases. The authors measured an increase in time spent processing clinical information relevant for the correct diagnosis when clinicians correctly revised an incorrect diagnostic suggestion relative to cases where the incorrect suggestion was followed and cases that were accompanied by a correct suggestion. These findings suggest that selective information processing was not directly associated with diagnostic errors but rather seemed related to revising an incorrect diagnosis.

Staal, J, Alsma J, Van der Geest, J, Mamede, S, Jansen, E, Frens, M, van den Broek, W, Zwaan, L. Selective processing of clinical information related to correct and incorrect diagnoses: an eye-tracking experiment. Med Educ. 2025;59(5):540-549. doi: 10.1111/medu.15544.