Portfolio as a tool to evaluate clinical competences of traumatology in medical students

Abstract

This article investigates whether a reflexive portfolio is instrumental in determining the level of acquisition of clinical competences in traumatology, a subject in the 5th year of the degree of medicine. A total of 131 students used the portfolio during their clinical rotation of traumatology. The students’ portfolios were blind evaluated by four professors who annotated the existence (yes/no) of 23 learning outcomes. The reliability of the portfolio was moderate, according to the kappa index (0.48), but the evaluation scores between evaluators were very similar. Considering the mean percentage, 59.8% of the students obtained all the competences established and only 13 of the 23 learning outcomes (56.5%) were fulfilled by >50% of the students. Our study suggests that the portfolio may be an important tool to quantitatively analyze the acquisition of traumatology competences of medical students, thus allowing the implementa-tion of methods to improve its teaching.