What’s Next for Systems of Assessment in Educational Settings

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and will feature interviews with health professions education authors and their research papers.

Podcast #3 explores Four big issues for assessment in health professions education in discussion with Louis Pangaro, and guest comments from Sharon Mickan and Martin Pusic. This discussion was originally prepared for the 2020 Systems Approach to Assessment in Health Professions Education course in Boston, where both Lou and Martin were expected to participate as faculty. However, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the course was postponed and rescheduled for October 18th through October 22nd, 2020 (the Systems course will now be offered annually in October).

Assessment in health professions education is complex, as expectations of health professionals evolve, as well as our understanding of how to demonstrate readiness for practice.

In this episode, Victoria Brazil speaks with course director Louis Pangaro about the Academic Medicine article What’s Next? Developing Systems of Assessment for Educational Settings by John Norcini.

We discuss the four big issues John Norcini nominates for attention – summative assessment (and how much is enough), formative assessment, assessment beyond the individual (including measures of process and measures of teams), and assessment in the context of complex adaptive systems in healthcare.

Informative and thought provoking discussion for teachers, learners, and leaders in health professions education.

Victoria Brazil, MD (Educators, ’05, Leaders ’07, Assessment ‘10) is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of Simulation at Bond University Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine. Her research interests include podcasting and simulation, and she is co-producer of Simulcast - a podcast about health care simulation. Victoria can be followed on Twitter.