Development and preliminary testing of a virtual reality measurement for assessing intake assessment skills

Objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) have been widely used in health care education to simultaneously assess knowledge, skill and attitude. Due to the high cost of running an OSCE, its application in professional psychology is still limited. To solve this problem, virtual standardised patient (VSP) implementations in creating psychology OSCEs can be a cost-effective method for administering a psychology OSCE regularly. This study aimed to develop and examine the psychometric properties of the VSP version of the Intake OSCE (VSP-Intake OSCE) in measuring psychologists' psychological assessment competencies (PACs) from entry to early practice. The initial development of the VSP-Intake OSCE contains a VSP station and a follow-up written station to measure PACs when conducting an intake assessment. To administer the VSP station, we built a new VSP system that allows psychologists to interact with a VSP verbally. A sample of 36 participants, including 27 graduate students and nine psychologists, were recruited to examine the psychometric properties of the VSP-Intake OSCE. As a newly developed instrument, the VSP-Intake OSCE revealed good inter-rater reliability and construct validity. We believe using VSP implementations to develop psychology OSCEs will be essential in promoting OSCE applications in professional psychology.