The Design of Interprofessional Performance Assessments in Undergraduate Healthcare & Social Work Education: A Scoping Review

Abstract

The increase in the number of people with multiple chronic conditions requires that future healthcare professionals learn to collaborate with professionals of various backgrounds. It is important that after graduation, students are ready to think from an interprofessional perspective. To make valid inferences about students’ interprofessional competencies, an interprofessional performance-oriented assessment approach is needed that yields evidence for the acquisition of interprofessional competencies. To date, little is known about the design of interprofessional assessments. The objective of this article is to examine the design quality of current interprofessional performance assessments in undergraduate healthcare and social work education. For this purpose, we did a scoping review and selected 28 studies. Based on a theoretical assessment design framework, we specifically analyzed the description of the purpose of the assessment, the assessment performances, the assessment exercises, and the assessment rating plan. Results show that in current interprofessional assessment practice, a rich variety of assessment exercises and assessment instruments is used. Much less is known about the role of the assessors and the performance criteria that are applied for the assessment of interprofessional competencies. We conclude that the design of interprofessional assessment performances and exercises that are aligned with the goals of interprofessional education needs further attention. We provide recommendations for future research regarding a more systematic design of well-aligned performance assessments in interprofessional education.