Keynote Message

Medicine, like all vocational degrees and career paths, has an important additional outcome when one considers the selection of the 'best' candidates, their training and continuing professional development; and that is the need to assure patient safety and quality of care. This additional onus, alongside an increasingly neoliberal political landscape, is driving a proliferation in the development and implementation of assessment methods. But what is the evidence base for what works and what helps to keep the recipients of their care safer? This talk will introduce concepts around validity, including the 'APA' validity framework, and how one might then critically appraise assessment instruments and methods. The framework can also be used when thinking about developing or modifying assessment methods for specific aims. This framework will then be used to explore the evidence and best practice from the continuum of medical assessment and how these principles might be useful in developing and quality assuring assessment practices in veterinary medicine.

Key References

1.  Downing SM. Validity: on the meaningful interpretation of assessment data. Med Educ. 2003;37(9):830–837. DOI: 10.1046/j.1365-2923.2003.01594.x

2.  Archer J, Lynn N, Coombes L, Roberts M, Gale T, Price T, et al. The impact of large scale licensing examinations in highly developed countries: a systematic review. BMC Med Educ. 2016;16(1):212. DOI: 10.1186/s12909-016-0729-7