Ottawa 2024

Technological developments are causing disruptions to health-professions education and assessment. Generative AI is being considered the most disruptive of these developments.

In times of rapid developments, It can be tempting to just look at this technology and make reactive changes or, worse, to try to forbid the use of it in assessment. But there is also growing consensus that technology and AI are here to stay, and that a fundamental rethink of our approaches to assessment is needed in this time of disruptive changes.

One suggested direction of reimagining assessment is one in which the learner with their use of technology becomes focus of the assessment and competence is seen from the perspective of distributed cognition rather than pure ‘biological’ cognition. The ‘biological’ cognition perspective sees the use of technology as cheating or cognitive offloading. Yet, our modern students are afforded with this technology, and therefore they will be also afforded as future healthcare professionals and so will their clients, consumers or patients.

Another proposed avenue is towards more assessment-for-learning programs and a reduced focus on assessment as individual artefacts or tests, or relying on pure assessment-of– learning programs.

Assessment for learning is much more than merely the provision of feedback in an otherwise traditional assessment program, or purely formative assessment. Such programs include, for example, distributed assessments, meaningful collation of assessment information, interleaving, collaborative assessment, increased learner agency and of course a design from the perspective of distributed cognition.

In this keynote presentation the background and design principles of such an assessment-for- learning program will be presented. Participants will be challenged to critique current assessment approaches in their own health professional discipline to determine the extent to which they are promoting assessment for learning.