Kwang Cham¹
Elizabeth Molloy¹, Anu Polster², David Steed1 and Anna Ryan¹
1 The University of Melbourne
2 La Trobe University

Feedback on procedural/clinical skills is essential for healthcare student skill development. Historically, the culture of assessment environments privileges assessors as providing judgement of student performance, and student self-assessment or reflection on performance during or immediately after a task is neither supported nor encouraged.(1) Yet self-assessment is recognised as being an important component of ongoing improvement in professional practice. Clearly traditional assessor-driven feedback approaches are not supporting our students to develop the kind of workplace-based behaviours expected of them in the future. 

We situated student self-reflection and dialogue with assessors in the ‘here and now’ and within constraints of current assessment conditions. Students across three health professions performed two formative simulated clinical assessment tasks, engaged in purposeful feedback conversation with assessors (including prompting for their own self-assessment), and then developed a learning plan for future learning. We aimed to understand if this approach was feasible, as well as impact on students’ learning experience. 

A total of 46 students and 12 assessors from Medicine, Dentistry and Optometry participated in the study. 41 learning plans were submitted. Focus groups were conducted with students and assessors to capture the experience of the intervention. 

Discussion: 

This study explores the feasibility of this assessment approach and whether students found value in ‘real time’ feedback dialogues that directed students to exercise their evaluative judgement. Initial observations suggest that students found the experience useful but may not have the resilience to digest negative feedback between tasks and recover to perform the next task. Assessors were cautious about the practicality of such an approach, and also pondered if the dialogue might negatively impact learning and performance at the next task station. 

The balance between authentic assessment, meaningful student learning and the demand and feasibility of such an assessment approach may be challenging. 

1. Chong L, Taylor S, Haywood M, Adelstein BA, Shulruf B. The sights and insights of examiners in objective structured clinical examinations. J Educ Eval Health Prof. 2017;27;14:34.