The Institute of Sport Exercise and Health leaders & lecturers of Sports Medicine, Exercise & Health MSc & iBSc courses presented at UCLs Annual Education Conference, an event that brings together the UCL education community to share learning outcomes/challenges while highlighting exciting practice that has been adopted over the past year. The sessions are designed to facilitate discussion amongst the whole UCL community.
They shared learnings from finding innovative ways of adapting to a virtual platform for face to face clinical assessments due to the impact of Covid -19, while evaluating student performance throughout the academic year.
Prof. Courtney Kipps and Dr Eleanor Tillett, course leaders of University College London (UCL) MSc Sports Medicine, Exercise and Health programme along with Dr Amal Hassan, postgraduate clinical lecturer presentation was centred around ‘Transforming Face to Face Clinical Assessments to a Virtual Platform.'
A summary of their presentation: A key learning outcome for students on the MSc in Sports Medicine, Exercise & Health is that they can assess patients with sports injuries and plan a reasoned management plan based on their diagnosis. Pre Covid this was assessed with face to face clinical exams but they have had to find a way of doing this virtually. Through moving to video recordings of joint examinations and live online vivas to assess clinical reasoning we’ve found it’s possible to create a robust virtual assessment of musculoskeletal clinical skills.
Dr Madi Davies, lecturer in Sports Medicine, Exercise and Health’s presentation was centred around student performance and was titled ‘Evaluating student performance throughout the academic year – is there evidence of an awarding gap in SEM research?’ A summary of Dr Madi’s Davies presentation found that: Assessment types vary across the MSc, BSc and iBSc programmes at the Institute of Sport Exercise and Health. This is important as it trains students to perform a variety of tasks they will need to in real world scenarios, but also to ensure students all have the ability to demonstrate their strengths across their degree. However, all students approach their degrees with different prior experiences, and all students must have similar opportunities to perform assessment well. We analysed the marks of undergraduate and postgraduate courses across the year, to observe these changed for one assessment type, and whether student characteristics such as sex affected their trajectory. We found differences between the scores by gender, and also between Undergraduate and Postgraduate programmes. This work will help us ensure students have an adequate understanding of expectations and assessment, and support us providing the best learning environment for measuring their progress throughout the year.