“Teaching Raters to See: A Faculty Development Innovation for Robust Assessment in Health Professions Education” represents a key step in the Center for Medical Simulation’s ongoing work to strengthen supportive and reliable assessment in health professions education: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41077-026-00439-6
CMS faculty member Lon Setnik and CMS Innovation Director Jenny Rudolph partnered with Demian Szyld, Clement Buleon, and Yoon Soo Park to address a central challenge: how to develop raters who can make consistent, meaningful judgments in complex, real-world settings.
How it works:
- Cognitive Process Focus: This work shifts the emphasis from “applying a rubric” to developing rater cognition—helping raters move from observing performance to constructing accurate narrative descriptions and making valid, consistent judgments.
- “Teaching Raters to See”: Trained raters learn to see through the eyes of the rubric, using tools such as behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) to align their judgments with shared standards.
- High-Stakes Assessments: This approach is particularly important in high-stakes contexts, where reducing rating error supports more trustworthy, defensible decisions.
This innovation builds on CMS’s commitment to supportive, high-quality assessment in health professions education, including tools like the DASH [https://harvardmedsim.org/debriefing-assessment-for-simulation-in-healthcare-dash/] and AIR (Advocacy Inquiry Rubric) [https://harvardmedsim.org/blog/introducing-the-advocacy-inquiry-rubric-air/], and our consulting on Applied Learning for Performance and Safety [https://harvardmedsim.org/alps-applied-learning-for-performance-and-safety/].
