Kinnear named an ABMS Visiting Scholar for 2022-2023
College of Medicine faculty member will study 'validity argumentation'
The American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) has selected Benjamin Kinnear, MD, associate professor in the departments of Pediatrics and Internal Medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, as a Visiting Scholar for 2022-2023.
Kinnear is one of 10 physicians selected this year, a record number for the program, which started in 2014. The one-year, part-time Visiting Scholars Program supports early-career physicians and researchers in scholarship and leadership development focusing on physician assessment in initial and continuing board certification.
ABMS Visiting Scholars are selected based on the quality of their proposed research project, the relevance of their research to the ABMS mission and the certification community and the likelihood of making substantial progress on the project during the scholar year. Focused areas of interest for the certification community include diagnostic accuracy, competency-based medical education and assessment, equity and diversity in health care and quality improvement.
Kinnear’s project is titled “Examining the Nature of Validity Argumentation in Health Professions Education Assessment” and is sponsored by the ABMS Research and Education Foundation.
Benjamin Kinnear, MD
“I'm honored and grateful to have the opportunity to collaborate with the ABMS, learn from other Visiting Scholars and further our field’s understanding of validity argumentation,” Kinnear says.
The aim of Kinnear’s Visiting Scholar project is to explore the attitudes and beliefs of validity scholars and competency-based medical education (CBME) stakeholders about the nature of argumentation in assessment validity. Kinnear says that CBME requires well-developed assessment systems that contribute to defensible decisions about learner readiness for practice.
“The defensibility of these decisions is often conceptualized in terms of ‘validity arguments,’ meaning the inferences and supporting evidence that demonstrate a decision is reasonable and sufficient,” Kinnear explains. “However, the philosophical, theoretical and practical aspects of argumentation that undergird validation practices in medical education have not been explored. This leaves important questions unanswered: How should validity arguments be evaluated and by whom? How should validity arguments be structured? Not knowing the answers to these questions leaves our field ill-equipped to undertake assessment validation.”
Kinnear is the first person to be named a Visiting Scholar while a UC faculty member. Two current faculty, Daniel Schumacher, MD, PhD, professor, and Trisha Marshall, MD, assistant professor, both in the Department of Pediatrics, had been Visiting Scholars before joining the College of Medicine. Schumacher was a 2014-2015 scholar while on faculty at Boston University School of Medicine, and Marshall was a 2019-2020 scholar while a fellow at Cincinnati Children’s.
This year’s Visiting Scholars’ research findings will be presented at the September 2023 annual ABMS Conference.
In addition to the ABMS Research and Education Foundation, which is sponsoring three of the 2022-2023 ABMS Visiting Scholars, others scholars are co-sponsored by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, American Board of Ophthalmology, American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery, American Board of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery, American Board of Radiology and American Board of Urology.
Established in 1933, ABMS is responsible for the creation of standards overseeing physician certification in the United States. Dedicated to improving the quality of care to the patients, families and communities they serve, the 24 ABMS Member Boards develop educational and professional standards and programs of assessment to certify physicians and medical specialists. More than 940,000 physicians and medical specialists are certified by one or more of the ABMS Member Boards in one or more of 40 specialties and 88 subspecialties.
Featured photo at top of CARE/Crawley building. Photo/University of Cincinnati.
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