When developing OSCEs for assessing “soft skills”, it’s been useful to employ an iterative process involving numerous cycles.

When developing OSCEs for assessing “soft skills”, it has been useful to employ an iterative process involving numerous cycles that:

• Conceptualize competence and identify the practice behaviors that represent the competency;
• Identify issues for potential scenarios that would provide enough information for students to demonstrate the competence;
• Design scenarios with input from actors; and
• Design a rating scale with specific behaviors along a continuum.

As the design team progress through each stage, we’ve clarified what we are trying to measure and are able to further develop the scenario and specify behaviors on the rating scale. Pilot testing further improves all aspects and materials in the OSCE. (Source: Bogo, M., Regehr, C., Logie, C., Katz, E., Mylopoulos, M., & Regehr, G. (2011). Adapting objective structured clinical examinations to assess social work students’ performance and reflections. Journal of Social Work Education (47)1, 5-18).