Assessment Portfolio

Assessment Portfolio

Introduction

Educational institutions subsist in wider political and economic systems, which both limit and facilitate the ways in which they counter to societal and individual needs. During the modern age education has been observed as a procedure with vast potential to build constructive futures and to transform lives, and this visualization of education as a locomotive of progressive social revolution has been taken up by ideas and beliefs across the political spectrum. (Avis & Fisher & Thompson, 2010) For several years, organizations influencing and administering nurses in practice have recognized teaching as an indispensable responsibility of all the registered nurses in taking care of both fit and unwell clients. The nurses to accomplish the role of a teacher, no matter whether their listeners consists of family members, patients, nursing staff, nursing students or other agency people, must have a firm base of the principles of learning and teaching. (Bastable, 2008) Over the past few years, postgraduate training programs, medical schools and licensing bodies are making efforts to provide reliable, timely and accurate assessments of the practicing and trainee physicians competence. In clinical education, assessment can be summative or formative. In formative assessments, benchmarks are provided to familiarize the learner who is approaching a comparatively formless sort of knowledge. They can strengthen the intrinsic motivation of the students to study and encourage them to set higher standards for themselves. Though summative assessments are proposed to provide specialized accountability and self-regulation, they may also act as an obstruction to further training or practice. A variation should be made between assessments that are appropriate only for formative use and those that have adequate psychometric strictness for summative use. This variation is particularly significant in choosing a method of assessing competence for assessments like certification and licensing of examinations. Likewise, adequate and satisfactory feedback may not be provided in summative assessments to drive learning. But since, students have a propensity to study that which they look ahead to be evaluated on, the learning may be influenced by summative assessment even without the presence of feedback. (Bernard & Goodyear, 2009)

Discussion

Since 2000 there have been remarkable changes in the traits of higher clinical education. The participation rates are much higher than ever which has altered the foremost mission of higher education and has also increased competition between the students. And hence, most practicing physicians, in one or another way are involved in assessing and evaluating the competence of peers, trainees and other health professionals. (Biggs, 2007) Discussed below is an update on the most frequently used methods of assessment. Moreover, the strengths and confines of each method, the challenges in the assessment of the professional performance and competence of the physicians in clinical education are also discussed briefly.

Methods of Assessment in Clinical Education

Following are the six methods of students' assessment in clinical education:

Written Examinations

The questions in written examination are typically categorized whether they are multiple choice or open-ended. In addition to this, questions can be either context poor or context rich. In clinical education, context rich ...