PTAS: A co-design approach to developing novel clinical reasoning assessments

Clinical reasoning is a core skill that all veterinary (BVM&S) students are expected to develop prior to graduation. It is a complex skill that requires students to work across a range of knowledge domains, whilst simultaneously applying this knowledge to the clinical context. There is significant interest in approaches to curriculum and assessment design that develop clinical reasoning skills, ambiguity tolerance and the ability to work across a variety of knowledge domains before students start their clinical rotations in final year. In accordance with the University’s recently revised Assessment and Feedback Principles and Priorities, we propose a project where students will work with faculty to use the ExamSys open source assessment platform to co-design clinical reasoning assessments that are appropriate for the penultimate year of the BVM&S programme. This will include exploring of the use of “autocomplete” functionality in question responses to avoid the pitfalls presented by existing multiple choice and short answer question formats. Student and faculty working groups will be used to evaluate whether such an approach to clinical reasoning assessment is tractable, against a number of success criteria, including staff workload, student experience, day one competency development and mainstreaming of learning adjustments. At the end of the project, a briefing paper will be prepared for the BVM&S Learning & Teaching Committee and the Head of Information Technology (College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine) to consider whether ExamSys should be deployed for clinical reasoning assessment on the BVM&S programme.