This book examines the challenges of cross-professional comparisons and
proposes new forms of performance assessment to be used in professions
education. It addresses how complex issues are learned and assessed
across and within different disciplines and professions in order to move
the process of "performance assessment for learning" to the next level.
In order to be better equipped to cope with increasing complexity,
change and diversity in professional education and performance
assessment, administrators and educators will engage in crucial systems
thinking. The main question discussed by the book is how the required
competence in the performance of students can be assessed during their
professional education at both undergraduate and graduate levels. To
answer this question, the book identifies unresolved issues and
clarifies conceptual elements for performance assessment. It reviews the
development of constructs that cross disciplines and professions such as
critical thinking, clinical reasoning, and problem solving. It discusses
what it means to instruct and assess students within their own domain of
study and across various roles in multiple contexts, but also what it
means to instruct and assess students across domains of study in order
to judge integration and transfer of learning outcomes. Finally, the
book examines what it takes for administrators and educators to develop
competence in assessment, such as reliably judging student work in
relation to criteria from multiple sources.
"... the co-editors of this volume, Marcia Mentkowski and Paul F.
Wimmers, are associated with two institutions whose characters are so
intimately associated with the insight that assessment must be
integrated with curriculum and instructional program if it is to become
a powerful influence on the educational process ..." Lee Shulman,
Stanford University
