Resources
- Definition of Health Disparities and Cultural Competency
- Related Sites
- Related Publications
-
Updates
(What is RSS?)
Assessment
Cultural Competency Stroop Task
In an effort to train faculty and prospective physicians to be aware of health disparities and also gain proficiency in effective communication with patients from diverse cultures, the Liason Committee on Medical Education (LCME; the accreditation body for North American medical schools) is requiring medical schools to include cultural competency objectives as part of educational curricula. Under this LCME mandate, medical schools must also demonstrate how well these objectives are being met in order to maintain accreditation.
While adding cultural competency components to an educational curriculum is a relatively easy task, the ability to assess the effectiveness of these components in fostering more competence in physicians, faculty, and students is much more difficult. There are a variety of assessment tools available to gauge this effectiveness. Most of these assessment measures, however, are not designed to evaluate individuals in a medical school setting. Moreover, most of these measures rely heavily upon individuals reporting their own evaluations of their competence; these self-report measures can be problematic and often inaccurate. There is a need, then, for a reliable, valid, and impartial measure of cultural competence in medical education.
An initiative has been created in the Department of Family Medicine to proactively fill this assessment need. From this initiative has come the development of a Cultural Competency Stroop Task (CCST). The Stroop Task, proposed in 1935 by John Ridley Stroop, is a neurologically based measure of cognitive processing. The classic version of this test presents individuals with color names (i.e. "red," "green," "blue") printed in congruent inks (i.e. "red," "green," "blue") and incongruent inks (i.e. "red," "green," "blue"). Individuals must then identify the color of the ink as quickly and accurately as possible. When color names are printed in incongruent ink, response times for identifying the ink color are longer because more cognitive processing is required than in the congruent ink condition. This occurrence has been called the "Stroop effect". An example of the classic Stroop Task can be found on PBS's NOVA website.
The Stroop effect has been demonstrated as robust throughout a number of variations. Iterations of the Stroop Task have been applied to the research of many topics, ranging from breast cancer-related anxiety to cognitive processing at extreme altitudes. It is the desire of the Department of Family Medicine to use another adaptation of the Stroop Task as a means for assessing cultural competency. Moreover, our desire is to compare and cross-validate the Cultural Competency Stroop Task with other, established evaluative tools that measure aspects of cultural competency via self-report. Ultimately, if the CCST is validated as a reliable indicator of cultural competency, other medical schools may be able to adapt it to fulfill their assessment needs.
The Cultural Competency Stroop Task is available online to the public by following this link: Cultural Competency Stroop Task. The Login ID and Password are both "guest".
- A screenshot of the Cultural
Competency Stroop Task