Next up we have a plenary session, this time exploring interdisciplinary approaches to assessment. There’s Colleen Gillespie, Director of Evaluation in the Program for Medical Innovations and Research.[1] And Adina Kalet, Co-director of the same program, and Sondra Zabar, also from that program. Their title slide has a wonderful nineteenth-century title-page prolixity about it:
Assessment Approaches in Medical School
Background and Current Trends
What NYU School of Medicine is Doing
with an emphasis on
Lessons Learned
(including many lessons Law Schools seem to have already learned)
The team began with Adina noting the share struggles between medical and law schools, eg competencies that are turned into rubrics — when use? who completes? What to do with the data? What’s the best scale? They’re going to give an overview of brand trends in assessment of professional development in medical education, some examples, and a brief intro to the Standardised Assessment program.
Why have medics moved so fast? First the threatened social contract — cost, quality, etc; medics clarified vision and had a growing consensus on competency frameworks; growing medical education research effort; paths are limited and predictable; medic educationalists and students live with their grads/patients. There were calls for accountability re medical education. eg the ACGME Outcomes Project. But little evident what we train physicians to do and its impact on public health…
There is overlapping literature between the professions, eg on defining professional competences; learning and assessing in context; sims and real settings new assessment approaches, including journals, portfolios, think-abounds, programmatic approaches to assessment, reflections, etc. After Flexner, there was a Carnegie call, Educating Physicians, as in law, focusing on standardisation and integration amongst other aims. Competencies vs time-based instruction. The performance of goal-state of instruction is the aim. She showed this slide from ACGME of core competencies below
and described entrustable professional activities:
Clinical competence is developmental:
What does it mean to trust a professional? Research in the cognitive sciences are making a significant difference:
Professional identity formation is central, and a way through the ‘morass of virtue and character’. She defined professionalism — a set of values, behaviours and relationships that underpins the trust the public has in doctors. They use structured identity professional essays:
Colleen presented the NYU med school’s assessment map. Complex! but highly ordered — 
PRIMES is an excellent process, based upon an iPad:
This data can be taken across the clinical rotation. The Reflective process is critical:
This was only a snapshot of what the med team were talking about. Absolutely wonderful presentation that should give us so much, as legal educators, to aim for.
Next up, Sondra on SPs, entitled ‘From Broadway to Bellevue’. Description of the SC programme, as the slides below illustrate. Excellent programme.
Finally Dr Aorit Shalomson, Asaf Gabizon, Adv, on evaluating hands-on academic sims for a large number of students. In her sim centre they train 150 students per day, in sims + debrief. They use the Monsters Inc sim. Not so sure about that method. But it’s clear that at Ono College there’s a detailed and highly effective programme of simulation embedded into workshops and theory-learning.
This was a fascinating session that certainly showed me, again, just how much we have to learning from our medical education cousins. They are so sophisticated in their method, in creative and imaginative educational thinking, and in their implementations.
- [1] Good grief. I have to stop just there for a moment and ask you, as I asked myself, how many of those words we don’t have in our law schools, and how much we need them↩