Keynote Session 1: Sunday 11 March
 

1A
The future of assessment: Learning to love the collective and the subjective
Professor Brian Hodges
University of Toronto, Canada


Assessment in the health professions flourished in the twentieth century, giving us an incredible array of new tools, approaches and research. Gains in the quality and fairness of assessment processes resulted, from the deployment of high quality psychometric methods. Many challenges remain however. Whereas yesterday we struggled to find reliability tools to assess individual competence, today we are challenged to find approaches that can capture the collective competence of teams. Yesterday we struggled to render our assessment systems more objective and more standardized, today we seek ways of capturing diversity, complexity, ambiguity, and judgment. Getting to get to the next level in assessment requires attention to the collective and the subjective.

Brian David Hodges, MD, PhD, FRCPC graduated from Queen’s University Medical School in 1989, completed psychiatry residency at the University of Toronto in 1994, a Master's of Higher Education in 1995 and a PhD in 2007. From 2003-2011 he was the Director of the University of Toronto Wilson Centre, one of the largest centres for health professional education research in the world. From 2004-2008 he was Chair of Evaluation for at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, overseeing assessment in the 62 specialty programs in Canada. Internationally he has worked with medical schools and licensure organizations in New Zealand, Switzerland, Poland, Japan, Jordan, Israel, France, Sweden, China, Australia and Ethiopia. In 2003 he spent a year at the University of Paris, earning a diploma in Health Economics and Social Sciences and established collaborations with the University of Paris and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Santé Publique (EHESP) where he served from 2005-2011 as a member of the education board. He was named Full Professor and Richard and Elizabeth Currie Chair in Health Professions Education Research at University of Toronto in 2009. In 2010 he became Vice President Education at the University Health Network (Toronto General, Toronto Western and Princess Margaret Hospitals) one of Canada’s largest teaching hospitals.

1B
Assessment of teaching performance: The state of the art
Professor Ron Berk
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA


After 80 years of research in higher education, how far have we progressed to comprehensively assess the job of teaching in medical education? Who cares? Why does this matter? Isn’t the ubiquitous student rating scale adequate to assess teaching? These and other questions percolating in your mind on this topic will be addressed in this Broadway-type production. Psychometric standards, the 360 multisource feedback model, formative and summative decisions, challenging technical issues, and the two most perplexing student-rating online administration problems will be covered at “twitch” speed.  If you teach, you don’t want to miss this “assessment” session.

Ronald A. Berk, PhD, is Professor Emeritus, Biostatistics and Measurement, and former Assistant Dean for Teaching at The Johns Hopkins University. He served 30 years of a life term at JHU before leaving 6.7083 years ago to pursue speaking and writing full-time. He is an Oxford Society of Scholars fellow and has received several teaching awards. Ron has presented more than 400 keynotes and workshops on humor, multimedia, stress management, and teaching assessment in 40 states and 14 countries. He destroyed scores of trees and shrubbery by publishing 13 books, one of which is Thirteen Strategies to Measure College Teaching, plus 160 journal articles, and 300 blogs. For details, see www.ronberk.com, www.pptdoctor.net, or www.linkedin.com/in/ronberk.