The Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) is a worldwide organisation with members in 90 countries on five continents. Members include teachers, educators, researchers, administrators, curriculum developers, deans, assessors, students and trainees in medicine and the healthcare professions.
AMEE promotes international excellence in education in the healthcare professions across the continuum of undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing education. AMEE, working with other organisations, supports teachers and institutions in their current educational activities and in the development of new approaches to curriculum planning, teaching and learning methods, assessment techniques and educational management, in response to advances in medicine, changes in healthcare delivery and patient demands and new educational thinking and techniques.
Complex Competencies: Practical Tools to Assess Patterns of Performance
Facilitator: Glenda Eoyang, Founding Executive Director, Human Systems Dynamics Institute
Summary of theme and why it is important: Some competencies are “Finite Games.” The goal is clear; instruction is unambiguous; highly reliable repetition is the goal; and performance is easy to observe and measure. Others, complex competencies, are “Infinite Games.” These include higher-level thinking skills, emotional intelligence, adaptive capacity, and contextualized judgement. These are important capacities for health care professionals, but they cannot be taught and/or measured using traditional methods and measures. Each instance is unique, practice and feedback are key, and performance emerges as a unique pattern over time for every individual. Best practices are well documented to support assessment of performance in Finite Games. For example, Entrustable Professional Activities capture and assess related competencies, but the emerging pattern of professional proficiency (to say nothing of excellence) continues to elude finite lists of finite observables.
A workable alternative emerges from human systems dynamics, at the intersection of complexity and social sciences. Infinite Games, ones without solid boundaries, simple measures, or root causes, are judged by the patterns they generate over time rather than a single sample in one observation. This session introduces three Adaptive Evaluation methods designed to capture evidence of pattern-based performance in Infinite Games: Pattern Logic, Simple Rules Rubrics, and Outcomes Harvesting. Participants will learn underlying theory, receive practical tools, and practice capturing and assessing pattern-based performance of complex competencies.
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