Accreditation and credentialing company The Board of Certification/Accreditation (BOC) collected a group of subject matter experts to review and update the content for all of BOC’s exams.
The certification examination represents a key step in the credentialing process to assess competency. Certificate-holders from the two major national orthotics and prosthetics (O&P) credentialing organizations, educators, and other medical professionals comprised this group of experts.
The experts, working in exam-specific groups, analyzed and revised test questions. As part of the process, the experts validated each exam’s content by referencing current student textbooks.
The experts were trained in the exam development process in an exam question-writing workshop at the beginning of the meeting. This workshop included instruction on exam question structure, rules for composing multiple-choice answers, the need for a specific citation for a correct answer, and the importance of security.
BOC’s Chief Credentialing Officer, Wendy Miller, BOCO, LO, CDME and BOC Credentialing Manager Michelle Yoon, organized and actively participated in this the workshop. While Dr. Steve Nettles, Program Director and former Senior Vice President of Psychometrics at Applied Measurement Professionals (AMP) hosted the event at AMP’s Olathe, Kan. Headquarters.
“This group of SMEs — with a broad range of education and experience — used textbook information and their own invaluable insights to compose effective and psychometrically sound questions,” Dr. Nettles said in a public statement.
AMP has been BOC’s testing vendor and partner in test development and implementation for longer than 20 years. As an O&P certifying organization, BOC offers testing with no application deadlines, allowing candidates to self-schedule exams five days a week, and on many weekends, 12 months a year. AMP was instrumental in empowering BOC to be the first in the O&P field to offer instant test results to candidates, which is now the professional standard.
“BOC complies with nationally recognized psychometric standards to assess the competency of our candidates,” BOC’s Miller said. “The dynamic nature of the O&P and Durable Medical Equipment (DME) fields necessitates periodic reviews of our examinations. The results of meetings like these are exams that are engineered to precisely gauge each candidate’s knowledge in his or her field.”
