A co-design approach to developing novel clinical reasoning assessments.

School: Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies and Edinburgh Medical School 

Team: Dr Alexander Corbishley, Dr Jill MacKay, Dr Paul Knight, and Eoghan Clarkson 

Abstract

Clinical reasoning is a core skill that all clinicians are expected to develop both prior to graduation and as their careers progress. It is a complex skill that requires students to work across a range of knowledge domains, whilst simultaneously applying this knowledge to the clinical context. There is significant interest in approaches to curriculum and assessment design that develop clinical reasoning skills, ambiguity tolerance and the ability to work across a variety of knowledge domains. 

In accordance with the University’s recently revised Assessment and Feedback Principles and Priorities, we propose a project where students will work with faculty to use the ExamSys open source assessment platform to co-design clinical reasoning assessments that are appropriate for the assessment of large classes. This will include exploring the use of “autocomplete” functionality in question responses to avoid the pitfalls presented by existing multiple choice and short answer question formats. Student and faculty working groups will be used to evaluate whether such an approach to clinical reasoning assessment is tractable, against a number of success criteria, including staff workload, student experience, competency development and mainstreaming of learning adjustments. To ensure that the project findings are applicable across different clinical domains, this project will work with staff and students from the undergraduate BVM&S (veterinary) programme and the post-graduate online MSc Pain Management (human) programme. At the end of the project, a briefing paper will be prepared for the respective programme Learning & Teaching Committees and the Head of Information Technology (CMVM).