Assessment and feedback
- Ongoing feedback and assessment in clinical practice help build trust. The intention is for learners to see the ‘big exam’ at the end as a culmination of all low-stakes assessments
- Some evidence suggested that learners in need of additional support often fail to make connections between high-stakes and low-stakes assessment – maybe a question of coaching and assessment literacy?
- Do learners who are struggling need remediation for not being able to complete the required assessment task to the satisfactory standard or do they need further support to help evidence their full potential?
- All assessments should be about actionable feedback, learning, reflection and moving practice forward
- All assessment is really teaching. High-stakes testing works best when it prompts review of the right things and learning
Programmatic assessment
- Challenges in programmatic assessment versus call for assessment to be creative, authentic and engaging for learners; compatibility of IT with assessment practice
- Operationalising programmatic assessment needs further work
Students as partners
- Bringing students along with us in the assessment and feedback journey
- Co-creation of assessment with students and faculty
Near-peer teaching/assessment/feedback
- Given that assessment is about teaching and learning, then peer and near peer engagement is essential. However, we do need to guide the peers carefully to avoid poor practice/awareness which derails the good work
Marking rubric development
- Non-engaged assessors may need a different approach of support. If we understand why they are not engaging, we should be able to address some/all of the issues
- Ties in with research around the issues of the legitimacy of multiple points of view from assessors with different experiences
- It is essential that we have a framework to support engagement meaningfully – this avoids tokenism, drives a sense of co-production, and allows individual educational development
Psycho-social and culturally focused research (and research methodology)
- Has moved medical/health professions education and research forward in the last 10 years
Resources
- Feedforward feedback (Kluger and van Dijk) – underutilised and should be encouraged, there are risks to be managed from any form of guidance: an area that needs more research
- Impact on motivation and performance with poor feedback (Kluger et al., Year)
- Challenging and opportunities with programmatic assessment focusing on student perspectives: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/medu.14852
- Robyn Tamblyn increasingly connecting learning, assessment and future clinical practice
- Andre de Champlain has recently published similar findings to Tamblyn. Both are in high-stakes testing contexts. In lower stakes contexts there is lots of evidence for “test-enhanced learning” (see Norman et al. for a curriculum level example)
- Understanding how we unpick variations in practice from assessment data: https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/31/5/340
- In postgraduate practice, work on electronic patient related outcome measures (ePROMS) very much linking assessment and patient outcomes (e.g., Janelle Yorke at The Christie)