Assessment Research Group
- Group summary: Group summary: The members of the Assessment Research Group (ARG) have wide-ranging expertise in formative and summative assessment, feedback, quality assurance, psychometrics, standard setting and mixed methods research. Core members have important advisory roles with a range of external organisations – for example the General Medical Council and new UK medical schools. Its members publish regularly in the medical education assessment literature, receive external funding for their scholarship and research, and contribute to leading national and international medical education conferences.
What we do
Our mission is to facilitate delivery of high quality, meaningful assessments, which balance quantitative measures of quality alongside broader evidence of validity.
Underpinning our success is an active programme of scholarship and research within the Leeds Institute of Medical Education. The ARG has a national and international reputation, publishing widely, and leading workshops and research presentations at medical educational conferences – for example AMEE and Ottawa. Recent areas of research interest include examiner stringency in OSCEs, tailoring support following summative exams and the role of generative AI in medical education (and assessment).
Areas of expertise relate to performance testing (eg OSCEs) and knowledge testing as well as broader issues relating to assuring assessment quality (psychometric analysis, assessment design and standard setting methods). The group has extensive PhD supervision experience with a number of ongoing student research projects relating to assessment and welcomes PhD applicants in any of these areas.
Our members hold a range of advisory assessment roles with external bodies, and we provide a range of assessment consultancy across the world. Our research and scholarship work has had a significant impact on student education at Leeds and beyond - including in the areas of quality assurance, standard setting and assessment design. We also have experience of wider educational research in a range of areas beyond merely medical education.
Key publications
Key publications our team has contributed to
Homer, M. 2025. Going beyond hawks and doves – Measuring degrees of examiner misalignment in OSCEs. Medical Teacher. 0(0), pp.1–7.
Ding, H. and Homer, M. 2024. Tailoring support following summative assessments: a latent profile analysis of student outcomes across five medical specialities. Advances in Health Sciences Education.
Homer, M. 2024. Towards a more nuanced conceptualisation of differential examiner stringency in OSCEs. Advances in Health Sciences Education. 29(3), pp.919–934.
Homer, M. 2023. Setting defensible minimum-stations-passed standards in OSCE-type assessments. Medical Teacher. 45(10), pp.1163–1169.
Homer, M. 2022. Pass/fail decisions and standards: the impact of differential examiner stringency on OSCE outcomes. Advances in Health Sciences Education. 27(2), pp.457–473.
Homer, M. 2021. Re-conceptualising and accounting for examiner (cut-score) stringency in a ‘high frequency, small cohort’ performance test. Advances in Health Sciences Education. 26(2), pp.369–383.
Pell, G., Fuller, R., Homer, M. and Roberts, T. 2013. Advancing the objective structured clinical examination: sequential testing in theory and practice. Medical Education. 47(6), pp.569–577.
Pell, G., Fuller, R., Homer, M. and Roberts, T. 2010. How to measure the quality of the OSCE: A review of metrics - AMEE guide no. 49. Medical Teacher. 32(10), pp.802–811.
Chair
Dr Matt Homer
Contact us
Dr Matt Homer, Leeds Institute of Medical Education, School of Medicine, University of Leeds, LS2 9NL
Telephone: +44 (0)113 343 4654
Email: m.s.homer@leeds.ac.uk
BlueSky: @leeds-arg.bsky.social