Assessment Practices in Evaluating Students Learning in an Educational Healthcare Setting

Assessment Practices
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Assessment Practices
Assessment or evaluation of student performance is an imperative step that enables interns and students gain practical skills learnt in their professional preparation programs (Watson et al., 2012). In a professional context, assessment highlights the idea of assessing students for learning. It includes matching the performance of the parties involved against competency to practice safely and effectively. Therefore, competent performance is anticipated throughout the society concerning health care professionals. Nevertheless, making student competent as well as teaching them what is expected of them in the health care field poses a lot of challenge. The current paper reflects on current assessment practices used to evaluate students learning in an educational health care setting.
There is an increased accountability in the contemporary society. The public is now aware of the term excellence. Therefore, there is a standard set for every health care professional. On the other hand, when students join the learning profession, their expectation is to be taught requisite knowledge and skills to make them competent heath care providers (Watson et al., 2012). Additionally, the employers who hire the graduate students have an assumption that the state license and the nursing degree certify or guarantee competent performance. Many methodological and definitional issues in the health care learning are based on these assumptions. However, the accountability social mandate does not accommodate ambiguous debate or assumptions. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the competent practice assessment experienced in the service sector receives considerable attention, implementing competency assessment models in the field of health care education has not been implemented fully.
The national agencies and associations have established various needs for practicing competent nursing tactics in the health care system. For instance, there is the American Association of Critical Care Nurses and the American Nurse Association (Watson et al., 2012). The Joint commission allied with the accreditation of organizations dealing with healthcare requires an assessment of clinical competence for all health care professionals. Additionally, the joint commission makes sure that the competency is demonstrated, maintained and improved continually after the professionals prove their competency.
The financial and legal implication of the safe practice and performance of employee in the current dynamic environment requires the continuing professional competency. As a result, continuous knowledge is imperative for the health care providers because of the dynamics and change experienced in the health care organizations. Therefore, there is need for assessing what the employees can do and not what they know. According to Levett-Jones et al. (2011), a gap exists between test takers who normally have challenges of recognizing warning signs or performing procedure for a patient having trouble. Levett-Jones et al. (2011) suggested utilization of criterion-based performance measure to establish practice competencies of the health care professionals as well as the need to correct skills a...