Given that I have a PhD in cognitive psychology, I am always interested in papers that apply research from that area to medical education. Therefore, it was with considerable interest that I read the paper "Exploring the impact of mental workload on rater-based assessments" by Tavares and Eva in this issue of AHSE. The central thesis of the paper is that one explanation for issues that occur with rater-based assessments is that there is a mismatch in terms of the mental workload required to make an assessment and the cognitive capacity a rater has available. As noted by the authors, the type of rating tasks that we give to raters can be very complex. This complexity causes variation in mental load, which in turn can have an impact on the quality of ratings.
展开▼
