Assessing ethics and law in the curriculum
Practice points for assessing ethics and law in the curriculum Make learning the goal of assessment in ethics and law.
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Index the content and form of assessment to the content and delivery of the course.
Match assessment methods with the competencies being tested.
Be mindful of the conceptual limitations of learning outcomes and constructs in ethico-legal education.
• Enhance quality through a range of assessment methods.
From the beginning of this AMEE Guide, emphasis has been placed on clarifying the goals of the ethics and law curriculum in order to specify outcomes across the range of learning domains. The reason for this is not only to shape the design and planning of course delivery according to the structural frame of choice within a coherent humanistic scheme, but also to give attention in advance to matters of assessment.
Assessment is also likely to be uppermost in our students’ minds! Specifically in relation to the ethics and law curriculum, Hope (1998) comments that, “Students need to be assessed both to ensure that they reach a certain standard, and so that these subjects are taken seriously”. More directly, Coles (1998) observes that students may “decide not to study a particular subject because it never comes up in the examinations”, and consequently “learning is restricted to what students believe is needed to pass the exam rather than to elaborate their knowledge”. Schuwirth & van der Vleuten (2006) add that if pure summative assessment without effective feedback is unhelpful to students in planning what they need to elaborate further, then so also “pure formative assessment with no consequences at all is often not taken seriously”.
The purpose of ethics and law assessment The well known truism that ‘assessment drives learning’ is partly about high stakes certification and progression to the next stratum of medical education, with which students are of course often preoccupied. But there is also the deeper sense in which assessment drives learning; that is, the purpose of assessment is principally for learning. Van der Vleuten (1996) identifies four mechanisms of this deeper function, which are through the content, the format, the post hoc information given, and the scheduling arrangements for assessment throughout the educational programme. It follows from this that good summative assessment also has a strongly formative component.
Teachable moments arising from the test promote ‘learning through assessment’ above ‘the assessment of learning’ (Friedman Ben-David, 2000). There is also learning from assessment, which is the dynamic of “how students learn the subject matter again by answering questions or performing tasks” (Schuwirth, 2010). Other occasions for formative assessment can be planned or opportunistic, and conducted by teachers, or by students individually in self-assessment, or by their peers. For feedback to be effective in facilitating learning, there are consequences for its type, structure, and timing, its
Students need to be assessed both to ensure that they reach a certain standard, and so that these subjects are taken seriously.
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Guide 53: Ethics and Law in the Medical Curriculum
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