MAY / JUNE 2007

HARVARD MACY

New program addresses role of assessment in creating a culture of continuous improvement

The Harvard Macy Institute welcomed 50 participants from 25 institutions to Boston in March for the first offering of a course on assessment in education. The objective of the five-day Program for Comprehensive Assessment in Health Science Education was to prepare participants to design and implement strategies aimed at helping to transform their medical institutions into true learning communities guided by the pursuit of continuous improvement.

Connie Bowe
Connie Bowe

The course was co-directed by Elizabeth Armstrong, PhD, Director of the Institute; Connie Bowe, MD, Senior Consultant at HMI; and N. Lynn Eckhert, MD, MPH, DrPH, Director of Academic Programs at HMI.

The participants, who hailed from institutions in the U.S. and abroad, included academic faculty, health care educators, and administrators with responsibility for assessment of students and residents, faculty, and educational programs. Nine institutions sent teams in the hopes that the participants could apply what they learned to post-program collaborations aimed at improving assessment.

The program was designed to address assessment in four major areas: learning, teaching, curricula and professional training programs, and institutional performance. Readings and presentations drew from the fields of business, engineering, and anthropology, among others. Each participant was part of a project team charged with designing a system of assessment aligned with their institutional objectives.

Eager at first to collect new tools for assessment, the participants engaged with the faculty’s suggestion that they start from an examination of their institution’s culture in order to identify the tools and strategies appropriate for them.

Course challenges participants to consider the
“real-world obstacles” to effective assessment

“Many of the course participants are under tremendous pressure to collect quantitative data to meet the requirements of outside accrediting and oversight bodies,” explained Bowe. “The program illustrated how a thoughtful systems approach allows organizations to streamline the amount of information gathered while linking it in creative ways that are useful in revealing patterns and relationships to inform decisions and more effectively promote their institutional goals.”

Armstrong added that adopting the right approach—aligned with the institutional mission, properly resourced, and accepted by all the key stakeholders—is critical to bringing an improvement-focused systems perspective to education. “Institutions that foster a learning community use assessment to reveal strengths and weaknesses in how the educational mission is carried out, and to trigger a system or process that is in place to address those issues as they arise,” said Armstrong.

One of the participants was M. Philip Luber, MD, who is the Director of Education in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Luber said that the course challenged him to “consider the real-world obstacles to implementing sophisticated assessment tools, such as the different ‘cultures’ of academic medicine”—one example being the medical culture of avoiding critical feedback. He added that over the course of the program he became “painfully aware of the snail-like movement of crucial assessment data in [his] program” and resolved to “make detailed, user-friendly, day-to-day formative evaluation the norm rather than the exception.”

Next time
The second Program for Comprehensive Assessment in Health Science Education will be held March 9-14, 2008 at the White Oak Plantation outside Jacksonville, Florida. This will be a residential program, and tuition will include room and board.

 

 

Copyright 2007 Harvard Medical International

 

 

 

 

Engineering change
An important component of the Harvard Macy Institute’s programs has been the inclusion of perspectives from outside of health care education. Among those who shared their insight with the participants in the assessment course was President Richard Miller, PhD of the F.W. Olin College of Engineering. As the college’s founding president, Miller and his fellow faculty and administrators have sought to instill a culture of continuous improvement that encourages their student engineers to be effective team members as well as independent thinkers, and to be able to articulate a vision, recognize problems, and design solutions. Naturally the college’s leadership have thought long and hard about how to approach assessment, and as in other areas of the school’s structure have incorporated a systems approach to evaluating students, faculty, and programs. 

The Olin approach, says Miller, drew influence from what he had observed during a visit to Harvard Medical School some years ago. “There were parallels between the case-based problem-solving that students at HMS were being asked to do, and the project-based learning we are working to instill at Olin.”

Asked about the challenge of applying wisdom from the engineering field to the issues facing educators and leaders in health care education, Miller spoke of the mutual benefits of “working with people in parallel disciplines. It is much easier to accept and analyze principles if you approach them in an environment outside of your own. It is remarkable how much you can learn this way, and amazing how few people do it. The Harvard Macy Institute is a great illustration of the value of this kind of multidisciplinary collaboration.”

Upcoming courses and events
Please visit the Harvard Macy Institute website for information about the following continuing education programs:

Program for Leaders in Medical and Health Care Education
December 2-7, 2007
Queensland, Australia

Program for Educators in the Health Professions
Two-part program with sessions January 13-23 and
May 18-23, 2008
Deadline to apply:
September 15, 2007

If you have not received your site credentials, please contact Terry Cushing. Visit the website often for information on the Institute and to keep your record updated.