Assessment: do we need to broaden our methodological horizons?

Although medical education is a broad field of research and practice, it has come to be dominated by issues of assessment. Reasons for this emphasis range from the focus on accountability for educational outcomes to the established relationship between assessment and student motivation. Researchers in the domain, especially in North America, have largely focused on methodologies taken from psychometrics and have overlooked the broader social sciences literature devoted to the analysis of social behaviour and social interaction. In this commentary we provide a critique of the ubiquitous use of psychometric methodologies and perspectives and argue that the social sciences offer other rich methodological resources for the study of assessment.