By adjusting the difficulty of the time-independent link items, the development of a competency parameter was determined, and the development of competencies was analysed based on differences in the competency values between both assessments (dimensions).
To accommodate the differences in the competency frameworks due to the age of youth to be served, two lists of common core competencies were presented, one that represented all of the frameworks and another that reflected frameworks designed for working with school-age youth.
Previous teamwork research has confirmed that the type of team influences the factors related to effectiveness [ 25, 32] and this study suggested that within healthcare settings there are perceived differences in the competencies important for management and clinical teams.
Very little rating agreement was found for individual items, however, there was no significant difference in the total competency scores between the two observers.
The hypotheses, which indicate a difference in the physical-technical competencies caused by formal entrance requirements for tertiary education, were confirmed, where the differences only exist between students with general entry qualification on the one hand and subject-specific entrance qualification and university of applied sciences entry qualification on the other hand.
While the under-representation of clinical care teams in the sample made it difficult to test if the observed differences in the reported competencies between the management and clinical teams were statistically significant, the fact that a sample of health service managers distinguished between competencies for clinical and management teams is an important finding and needs further study.
Difference in EBM competency based on the Berlin tool and the assessment tasks was assessed using the two-tailed, non-parametric Mann–Whitney U test.
The first controlled trial examining BL within the EBM context was performed in a small cohort of graduate-entry medical students and identified no difference in EBM competency between students receiving the BL approach and those receiving a didactic learning (DL) approach [ 3].
The greatest difference in competency on entry was in the BVJ, with a difference of 0.67 logits.
No significant difference in EBM competency was observed between students undertaking the EBM course using the BL approach compared to students undertaking the DL approach.
