Health professionals require skills and attitudes beyond medical knowledge and pre-clerkship faculty play an early role in developing these attributes in students. However, because of the heavy focus on medical knowledge during pre-clerkship training, programs often struggle to incorporate experiences and assessments that prepare students for all aspects of clinical work. One approach to addressing this issue is to incorporate competency-based assessment schemes into the pre-clerkship curriculum that are compatible with established small group learning modalities. While maintaining the importance of medical knowledge, competency-based assessment strategies allow a more holistic view of student development and can be used to coach learners in a variety of domains, such as practice-based learning and improvement, systems-based practice, interpersonal skills and communication, and professionalism. They also provide students with rich feedback across all aspects of their performance and establish a roadmap that encourages learner development and sustainability.
This interactive focus session will provide practical information and a framework that participants can use to implement milestone-based assessment strategies that include multiple competency domains at their institutions. After completing this focus session, participants will be able to:
- Describe qualitative formats of assessment and how they can be used to equip students with a diverse set of competencies during pre-clerkship medical education.
- Design different team-based learning environments that can be used to observe student behavior.
- Discuss how feedback from these sessions can be used to identify previously undetected competency challenges and allow opportunities for coaching and remediation before students enter the clinical workplace.
- Develop standardized milestone-based competency language for assessing student performance.
Kimberly Dahlman - Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Neil Osheroff - Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Cathleen Pettepher - Vanderbilt University School of Medicine