Category: Assessment
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Towards a competency-based curriculum in physiotherapy
I’ve been thinking about the concept of competency based education (CBE) in relation to the altPhysio series that I’m busy with. I’m drawn to the idea of CBE but am aware that there are some criticisms against it, especially from a theoretical and pedagogical perspective. This post is a short note to clarify some of my…
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How do we choose what to assess?
Assessing content (facts) for the sake of it – for the most part – is a useless activity because it tells us almost nothing about how students can use the facts to achieve meaningful objectives. On the other hand, how do you assess students’ ability to apply what they’ve learned? The first is easy (i.e.…
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Where does the path of least resistance lead?
Human beings are psychologically predisposed to do the easiest thing because thinking is hard and energy intensive. We are geared through evolution to take short cuts in our decision making and there is little that we can do to overcome this natural predisposition to take the path of least resistance (see System 1 and System…
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Providing students with audio feedback
I’ve started providing my students with audio feedback on a set of about 60 clinical case studies that they recently submitted. I was depressed at the thought of having to write out my feedback; I tend to provide a lot of detail because I almost always try to provide a rationale for the comments I’ve made. I…
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Abstract for RCTs in educational research
There seems to have been a resurgence in calls for the use of systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials in educational research lately. There’s a lot to like (in my opinion) about RCTs in certain contexts because of how they are designed. For example, when you want to figure out the effect of variable A on…
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Assessing teams instead of individuals
Patient outcomes are almost always influenced by how well the team works together, yet all of the disciplines conduct assessments of individual students. Yes, we might ask students who they would refer to, or who else is important in the management of the patient, but do we ever actually watch a student talk to a…
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Are we gatekeepers, or locksmiths?
David Nicholls at Critical Physiotherapy recently blogged about how we might think about access to physiotherapy education, and offers the metaphor of a gated community as one possibility. The staff act as the guards at the gateway to the profession and the gate is a threshold across which students pass only when they have demonstrated the right…
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Abstract: Student Success and Engagement project
Our faculty has implemented a 3 year research project looking at improving Student Success and Engagement in the faculty. The project is being coordinated across several departments in the faculty and is the first time that we are collaborating on this scale. I will be using this blog as a public progress report of the project,…
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Objective Structured Clinical Exams
This is the first draft of the next piece of content that I’ll be publishing in my Clinical Teacher app. Abstract The Objective Structured Clinical Examination was introduced as an assessment method that aimed to address some of the challenges that arose with the assessment of students’ competence in clinical skills. In a traditional clinical…
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“Eleven hundred hours” – Poem by a student
For the past few years I’ve been asking my final year students to develop a learning portfolio as part of the ethics module I teach. Even though I encourage them to use different forms of knowledge representation, few of them take up the offer. However, every now and again someone submits something very different to…
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Understanding vs knowing
Final exams vs. projects – nope, false dichotomy: a practical start to the blog year (by Grant Wiggins) Students who know can: Recall facts Repeat what they’ve been told Perform skills as practiced Plug in missing information Recognize or identify something that they’ve been shown before Whereas students who understand can: Justify a claim Connect…
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Assessing Clinical Competence with the Mini-CEX
This is the first draft of an article that I published in The Clinical Teacher mobile app. Introduction The assessment of clinical competence is an essential component of clinical education but is challenging because of the range of factors that can influence the outcome. Clinical teachers must be able to make valid and reliable judgements…
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Clinical reasoning: Identifying errors and correcting
Yesterday I attended a presentation on clinical reasoning by Professors Vanessa Burch (University of Cape Town) and Juanita Bezuidenhout (University of Stellenbosch). Here are the notes I took during the presentation. How does CR work? How do errors occur? Do clinician educators contribute to errors? Can we identify students with CR difficulties? Can we improve…
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David Hirsh seminar – Longitudinal integrated clerkships
How to build longitudinal Integrated Clerkships to fit context: Practical tools for modern pedagogy (Prof. David Hirsh, Harvard Medical School) Last week I attended a seminar by Prof. David Hirsh from Harvard Medical School, where he discussed the implementation of the Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship (LIC) in their programme. Here are my notes from the seminar.…
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Getting over a theory of student learning styles
Some interesting points from a short blog post on learning styles. The periodic critiques of the research make the same points. 1 We don’t know what learning styles are. Researchers haven’t agreed on whether they are attributes, preferences, habits, strategies, or biological traits. We don’t know if they are cognitive, neurological, psychological, or situational. 2…
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Adding complexity for its own sake
I was discussing a PhD project with a colleague at the HELTASA conference a few weeks ago and she was describing her plan to me. She’s interested in the possibilities that mobile technology brings to higher learning, specifically in nursing education. I gathered that she was talking about mobile as a combination of hardware and…