MEDEX Northwest is pleased to recognize the recent publication of a research article co-authored by MEDEX faculty member Lisa Walker, MPAS, PA-C.

The Applications of Adaptive Minimum Match k-Nearest Neighbors to Identify At-Risk Students in Health Professions Education

Kumar, Anshul; DiJohnson, Taylor; Edwards, Roger A.; Walker, Lisa
The Journal of Physician Assistant Education, 34(3): p 171-177, September 2023

“The program I founded at MGH Institute of Health Professions,” Walker explains, “adheres to a Team-based Learning (TBL) pedagogy for nearly all its courses. In TBL, students take quizzes almost daily. Over the course of the first five years of the program, we had gathered a large amount of data on student performance. Looking for ways to anticipate student performance on the PA National Certification Examination (PANCE), my colleagues and I chose to use these outcomes to look at the application of machine learning in achieving this goal. This article discusses the process of identifying which machine learning approach was the most accurate and then explores the important concept of how to ethically apply the results in intervention and remediation when students are identified as potentially at risk of failing this high-stakes exam.”