“Now, let’s assess communication skills!” – How to integrate assessment into your communication skills curriculum

Rationale: Communication skills training has become increasingly integrated into the education of health care professionals (e.g. physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, pharmacists, etc.). In addition to teaching communication skills, there are important reasons to assess the extent to which students and vocational trainees have acquired these skills. Research evidence supports the need to integrate assessment longitudinally within the whole curriculum. The purpose of this workshop is to explore the factors that must be taken into consideration in order to effectively integrate assessment of communication skills within health professional curricula. Objectives: After this session participants will be (more) able to: 1) Evaluate their communication curriculum according to the pyramid of maturity of communication curricula (Silverman, 2009) and clarify the objectives and the outline of their teaching; 2) Reflect on the integration of assessments into their communication curricula 3) Consider opportunities for improvement to achieve an integrated longitudinal communication curriculum 4) Clarify important notions related to assessment like ‘blueprinting’, ’formative versus summative assessment’, ‘valid and reliable assessment instruments’, ‘context specificity’, ‘ patient feedback’, ‘standard setting’, ‘overall assessment plan’, etc. Session format/activities: The workshop starts with clarifying the workshop objectives and participants’ expectations. Then, participants are asked to evaluate in pairs where their curriculum would be in the pyramid of maturity of communication curricula and to discuss the relevance of assessment in their curriculum. For each of the steps in the pyramid the role of assessment can be clarified, making curriculum development goals more evident. Then small groups are formed according to the steps in the pyramid. Participants will discuss why they put themselves there, what their teaching looks like, and what and how they assess. In a next step they are asked to make an inventory of the most important issues and bottlenecks concerning the integration of assessments into communication curricula. Further small group discussions will look at what each needs to proceed to the next step in the pyramid, which are their priorities and which are their realistic goals taking participants’ specific context into regard. In a final plenary session ideas and solutions will be shared and synthesized into take‐home messages.status: publishe