A history of assessment in medical education

The way quality of assessment has been perceived and assured has changed considerably in the recent 5 decades. Originally, assessment was mainly seen as a measurement problem with the aim to tell people apart, the competent from the not competent. Logically, reproducibility or reliability and constr...

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Published inAdvances in health sciences education : theory and practice Vol. 25; no. 5; pp. 1045 - 1056
Main Authors Schuwirth, Lambert W. T., van der Vleuten, Cees P. M.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.12.2020
Springer
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Construct Validity
Design
Education
Educational Assessment
Educational History
Evaluation Methods
Holistic Approach
Intelligence
Invited Paper
Medical Education
Performance Based Assessment
Personality
Personality traits
Personnel Evaluation
Psychology
R&D
Research & development
Validation studies
Validity
Programmatic assessment
History
Assessment
Workplace based assessment
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Summary:The way quality of assessment has been perceived and assured has changed considerably in the recent 5 decades. Originally, assessment was mainly seen as a measurement problem with the aim to tell people apart, the competent from the not competent. Logically, reproducibility or reliability and construct validity were seen as necessary and sufficient for assessment quality and the role of human judgement was minimised. Later, assessment moved back into the authentic workplace with various workplace-based assessment (WBA) methods. Although originally approached from the same measurement framework, WBA and other assessments gradually became assessment processes that included or embraced human judgement but based on good support and assessment expertise. Currently, assessment is treated as a whole system problem in which competence is evaluated from an integrated rather than a reductionist perspective. Current research therefore focuses on how to support and improve human judgement, how to triangulate assessment information meaningfully and how to construct fairness, credibility and defensibility from a systems perspective. But, given the rapid changes in society, education and healthcare, yet another evolution in our thinking about good assessment is likely to lurk around the corner.
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ISSN:1382-4996
1573-1677
DOI:10.1007/s10459-020-10003-0