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CCM Seminar 16- Learning and assessment in the workplace

By Ayse Gur Geden, on 29 March 2019

In this week’s seminar, Arpan Tahim  shared some preliminary data from his research on workplace-based assessment in postgraduate surgical education. This proved to be a really interesting session where we had the opportunity to learn more about video-ethnographic and reflexive techniques: please see the abstract below for further details.

Learning and assessment in the workplace

Arpan Tahim

This study explores workplace-based assessment (WBA) in postgraduate surgical education. WBA refers to the assessment of day-to-day practices undertaken in the working environment. It involves a clinical teacher, acting as an assessor, observing an episode of patient care that the learner carries out as part of their practice. Existing research relies on largely psychometric approaches, but it has been suggested that re-imagining the WBA as an intricate, real-time, social phenomenon may be a more appropriate way to interpret these complicated interactions. This study uses video-ethnographic and reflexive techniques to explore WBA through a socio-cultural lens in order to examine the unique context, content, process and impact of these real-life events. Data is being generated through video-recordings of WBA interactions in the clinical environment, the learner’s formal WBA report (created after all WBAs), and through reflexive interviews conducted with the learner. This presentation will explore my very early findings after preliminary data collection and outline further work. This research should provide new understandings of WBA use as an educational tool. More broadly, surgical education represents an important ‘telling case’ to explore workplace learning/assessment in greater detail. Insights gained could shed light on the potential of assessment in the wider workplace.