Assessment & Feedback

Assessment at the School of Medicine is designed to support learning, guide growth, and help students understand their progress toward competence over time.

How Assessment Supports Learning

Assessment is more than a score. It helps students recognize strengths, identify gaps, receive feedback, and make informed plans for continued growth. It also helps faculty understand how students are progressing and where additional support may be needed.

In a competency-based medical education framework, student progress is understood over time. No single assessment tells the whole story. Instead, multiple sources of evidence help describe how students are developing across knowledge, skills, clinical reasoning, professional behaviors, and preparation for increasing responsibility.

Assessment for Growth Feedback That Guides Action Progress Over Time
Assessment helps students understand where they are and what to do next. Feedback should be clear, timely, specific, and connected to improvement. Students build competence through repeated practice and evidence of growth.

Assessment for Learning & of Learning

The assessment program includes both formative and summative approaches. Each serves a different purpose, and both are important for student growth and program accountability.

Formative Assessment Summative Assessment
Formative assessment is used for practice, feedback, reflection, and self-check. These activities are generally lower stakes and help students identify what they understand, where they are uncertain, and what to work on next.

  • Knowledge checks and quizzes
  • Case-based reasoning activities
  • Reflection prompts
  • Practice questions and feedback
  • Small-group application activities
 Summative assessment is used to evaluate performance, document achievement, and support decisions about progression and readiness. These assessments are aligned with course outcomes, program expectations, and competency development.

  • Written examinations
  • Clinical skills assessments
  • Performance-based assessments
  • Course assessments and clinical learning assessments
  • Progression-related assessment evidence

How Assessments Help Students Grow

Strengths Gaps Next Steps
Students should be able to recognize areas where they are performing well and where their learning strategies are effective. Assessment should help students identify knowledge gaps, reasoning errors, skill needs, or professional behaviors that require attention. Feedback should help students decide what to review, practice, discuss, or change in their learning approach.
Clinical Reasoning Professional Growth Patterns Over Time
Assessment should reveal how students think through problems, not only whether they select the correct answer. Students should understand how communication, preparation, accountability, teamwork, and professionalism contribute to competence. Looking across multiple assessments helps students and faculty see patterns that may not be visible in a single score or activity.

Feedback for Growth

Feedback is most useful when it helps students take action. Effective feedback describes what was observed, connects that observation to expectations, and identifies possible next steps for improvement.

Observe → Interpret → Act
What did the student demonstrate? What does the performance suggest about current development? What should the student do next?

Assessment Roles

Role of Faculty Role of Students
Faculty help make assessment meaningful by aligning expectations, observing performance, giving feedback, and using assessment evidence to support student development.

  • Align questions and activities with learning outcomes
  • Provide specific feedback connected to performance
  • Use assessment evidence to identify learning needs
  • Support students in interpreting feedback and planning improvement
 Students are encouraged to engage with assessment as part of learning, not only as a judgment of performance. Growth depends on preparation, reflection, feedback use, and follow-through.

  • Prepare for assessments and learning activities
  • Review feedback carefully
  • Reflect on patterns of performance
  • Use feedback to guide study, practice, and improvement

Assessment Information & Educational Systems

The School of Medicine uses educational systems to organize assessment information, support feedback, and help faculty and students understand performance patterns. These systems may support formative checks, structured exams, evaluations, competency tracking, and reporting.

Canvas ExamSoft One45 Power BI / Dashboards
Supports formative checks, reflection, learning activities, and course structure. Supports secure assessment, blueprinting, item tagging, and exam analysis. Supports forms, evaluations, competency tracking, and longitudinal data collection. May help translate assessment data into useful patterns and signals for students, faculty, and program leaders.

As systems mature, assessment information can help students and faculty identify patterns of progress and areas for continued growth.