Valerie Landau is Director of Assessment at Samuel Merritt University, and is helping this 100 yr old institution transform the way health professionals learn. The school has been alarmed to find that the most recent cohort of incoming students are really good at memorizing very large amounts of information, but cannot apply their vast trove of information to hands-on application.
They distinguished the difference between 'just in case' learning - teaching large amounts of data 'just in case' it might be needed at some future point - to outcomes based learning.
To do that, Valerie has invented a highly interactive auditory, visual, and somatic assessment methodology that allows the faculty of Samuel Merritt to determine whether their course content imparts compassion, ethics, critical thinking, clinical competence, evidence-based inquiry, technically competence, and leadership skills in a way that engages whole-brain thinking.
In this second of a three-part presentation, Valerie Landau presents her educational assessment tool at the Franchise for Humanity at Stanford University, California on Feb 21, 2014.
The audience enacted alignment of the faculty-produced outcome objectives as moving musical pieces. For the nurse anesthesiology program, as part of the quality improvement in nursing initiative, the following desired learning outcomes were made into a musical score, and each person stood up if their note and shape (and outcome) were produced by the classroom training.
The outcomes being assessed were:
Patient-centered care - diamond
Team-work and Collaboration: star
Evidence-based Practice - circle
Quality-improvement - square
Safety - triangle
Informatics - hexagon
Watch as gamification brings home the message of how well a curriculum might provide desired outcomes, while engaging the whole audience (and the whole faculty body where this tool was developed, at Samuel Merritt University).
Reflective practices and long-term higher-level outcomes, avoiding the traps of inherent biases and 'feel good' education, are covered in this engaging talk about the future of educational assessment.
In this final video of Valerie Landau's assessment tool for outcome-based learning, given at the Franchise for Humanity, Stanford University Design School, Feb 21, 2014, Valerie walks through the history of the tool design process.
Valerie hands out candy to the faculty as part of their holistic assessment approach. They match the color on card that describes a core competency with the color of their 'assessment candy.' The faculty often come back saying they're thinking about that competency in their curriculum when they taste that candy flavor...yet another form of gamification.
She notes that the four major college accrediting organizations have seen this assessment tool and think 'everyone should be using this.'