Spheres of Influence: Ventures and Visions in Educational Development*

3-6 July, 2002
The University of Western Australia
Perth, Western Australia

Abstract

By the assessment the profession is known

Janice Orrell, Flinders University, Australia

The assessment of newly learnt workplace and professional learning and literacy is extremely difficult. When student learning behaviour is observed and assessed in the clinic or workplace the evidence is often fleeting, shaped by competing contextual constraints, and much of the thinking that underpins the behaviour is tacit and difficult to retrieve or justify in post action reflection. These conditions confound assessors when they must determine the appropriateness of a novice practitioners' clinical or professional reasoning. Furthermore, the clinical or workplace conditions are not replicable. This creates difficulty in establishing parity in assessment between individual students or to determine whether a novice is consistent in their capacity to meet particular challenges. To compensate for these and other challenges in assessing workplace learning and professional literacy a number of common responses occur. One response is that simplified surface behaviours are assessed. These fail to reflect the complexity of professional behaviour and reasoning. Another response is to devised standardised assessment tasks outside the workplace are that of lack authenticity. Alternatively workplace learning is not assessed and becomes 'work required'. All of these responses risk portraying an incomplete, oversimplified or inaccurate profile of the profession for which the student is being prepared as a graduate.

This presentation will consider a model of clinical assessment and processes for supervisors to assess workplace learning that clarifies for the student the complex dimensions of professional reasoning and appropriate professional dispositions. It is the focus of assessment and the process that tells them what is the nature and qualities of the profession.

Key words:
Clinical education; Professions education; Assessment of clinical learning

Objectives, outcomes and activities:

• To explore the limitations of current practices in clinical of work-based education;
• To explore a model of clinical or workplace education that portrays the appropriate emphasis in regard to the development of professional dispositions.

Janice Orrell has a PhD in Educational Psychology and is the Academic Coordinator in the Staff Development and Training Unit. Since 1997 she has developed an institution wide academic development program in teaching and research. Her major field of scholarship is comparing assessors' thinking while assessing student learning products with their personal, practical beliefs about assessment. Another field of scholarship is teaching and assessing work-place learning and transfer of learning between clinical contexts and classrooms.

Contact: Janice Orrell, email: janice.orrell@flinders.edu.au