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More than just Assessment: How to make better assessments and make them work for everyone

Conference Workshop
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Conference Workshop

11:00 am

27 February 2024

M213

Assessment choices

Presentation Description

Daniel Zahra1
Gergo Pinter1 and Louise Belfield2
1 Peninsula Medical School
2 Brunel Medical School


Background: The global healthcare workforce is moving away from siloed practice to multi- and inter-disciplinary teams, requiring programmes to place greater emphasis on competency and application over demonstrating discrete knowledge. New and aspiring doctors now also hail from a wider range of backgrounds than ever before, reflecting ever greater access to medical education. Yet assessment has, in most cases, been slow to reflect these changes, relying on methods of design, criteria and standard setting, and performance aggregation that have changed little from those designed largely by and for generations past. 
 
Importance: It is important to realise the impact that assessment has on learning, and curriculum design, and ensure that it is used as a tool to support and drive development of those qualities we wish to instil and champion as educators, and those currently required by our graduates. We need to be mindful of the types of skills assessments can – and cannot – measure, and create them in such a way as to allow all candidates to demonstrate their knowledge. Whilst traditional methods serve particular purposes, more can be done to make assessments accessible, equitable, and beneficial to all involved; students and educators alike. This also entails an awareness of over-assessment, and an obligation to use assessment more effectively, rather than use additional assessments or increasingly complex statistics to compensate for limitations in assessment, curricula, or regulatory design.
 
Format: The first part of the workshop will summarise the contextual changes necessitating a review of assessment practices, and involve group discussion of the commonplace considerations, leading into discussion of the broader, often unconsidered dimensions of assessment. These will be considered with respect to what attendees are familiar with, have encountered themselves, and the underlying cultural and systemic causes of assessment challenges. The second part will consider alternative approaches to the designing of a range of assessments, including but not limited to multiple choice formats, structured clinical examinations, and essay-based assessments, and how we can improve their accessibility, inclusivity, and overall assessment reliability and validity. We will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each, along with consideration of how assessment design, structure, and strategy needs to align with programme aims and other aspects of teaching, assessment, and the curriculum overall. The session will conclude with summary discussions of examples offered by the group, and what we’ve learnt about how assessments can be made more equitable, efficient, and aligned to programmatic aims, and how these learning points can be applied to the attendees’ own practice. 
 
Participant: Anyone with an interest in assessment, widening access, and education more generally should find something of use and interest in this workshop.
 
Level: ‘Intermediates’, with some knowledge of assessment practice would find this most useful, although we aim to provide introductions to concepts that are suitable for beginners, and provide new insights for advanced colleagues as well.
 
Message: Good assessments should allow everyone to excel, and provide useful information for improvement, directing future learning, and assuring institutions and regulators. They should also be suited to, and driven by, their aims and alignment to the teaching, desired learning, and learning outcomes, not by pre-existing methods or traditions.
 

 
References 
 
Ali, K., Winter, J., Webb, O, and Zahra, D. (2022) Decolonisation of curricula in undergraduate dental education: an exploratory study. British Dental Journal, 233, 415–422
 
Burr, S.A., Kisielewska, J., Zahra, D., Hodgins, I., Robinson, I., Millin, P., Gale, T., Santos, N., Pêgo, J.M. (2022 preprint) Personalising knowledge assessments to remove compensation and thereby improve preparation for safe practice - developing content adaptive progress testing. Research Square. 
 
Watson, H., Dolley, M-K., Perwaiz, M., Saxelby, J., Bertone, G., Burr, S., Collett, T., Jeffery, R., and Zahra, D. (2022) ‘Everyone is trying to outcompete each other’ – A qualitative study of student attitudes to a novel peer-assessed undergraduate teamwork module. Federation of European Biochemical Societies: Open Bio
 
 


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