Greetings from the Certification Team!

We’ve been busy over the past few weeks performing a review of every item in both the CHSE and CHSOS item banks. We perform this item bank review every five years to ensure the test questions that can appear on an exam form are relevant to the current knowledge and skills required of healthcare simulation professionals.

Our accrediting agency, the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA), requires programs to perform these reviews every five to seven years as the knowledge and skills that certifications are designed to assess may change over time. This is not to say this item bank review is the only time content is evaluated. Individual test questions that appear on exam forms are reviewed by subject matter experts pre- and post-administration, but this review ensures every single item in the bank is evaluated.

For this review, 70 subject matter experts, who are currently certified, were selected. Those currently holding the CHSE were assigned CHSE content and those currently holding the CHSOS were assigned CHSOS content. The volunteers were selected to ensure as much diversity as possible in the reviews. The volunteer group’s years of experience ranged from 2 years to 27 years, and their geographic regions spanned 17 different countries.

The volunteers were instructed to review each item they were assigned specifically for the following criteria:

1. Identify and flag outdated or biased content.
2. Identify and flag items of low quality, including items that are too easy or too difficult, are unclear, or poorly constructed.  
3. Identify and flag items that are of low importance.

The test questions that were flagged during this review will be removed from the item banks until they can be evaluated by another group of certified subject matter experts. These volunteers will evaluate both the item and the comments left by the initial reviewer and will determine if the item should be revised and re-tested or deleted from the item bank entirely.  Typically, items that are flagged for being unclear or poorly written are often revised while items deemed outdated, biased, or of low importance are deleted.

In closing, I would like to thank everyone who volunteered to participate in the item bank review exercise. We had hundreds of individuals who volunteered, and they are all greatly appreciated. The certification team relied heavily on volunteer subject matter experts to engage in activities such as this which are an important part of ensuring the quality and fairness of our certification programs.

That’s all for now. Until next time, be excellent to each other!

Rachel Araujo
SSH Director of Certification