Clinician's Commentary on Mori et al.1

The preparation of future health care providers—doctors, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists, and others—is considered a high-stakes responsibility in civil society because these graduates become autonomous health care providers entrusted with the care of patients and families. In Canada, we place our collective trust in university programmes to prepare physiotherapists for practice at the master's-degree level. Whenever an institution is entrusted with a high-stakes educational endeavour, we (as a society) expect and assume that student competency is systematically assessed using valid and reliable measures and that students safely and effectively demonstrate required learning outcomes during their course of study. In professional, entry-level Master of Physiotherapy (MPT) programmes, graduating physiotherapy (PT) students complete about one-third of their total academic credit units engaging in full-time clinical courses in PT practice settings. The other two-thirds of MPT programmes consist of relevant academic and applied courses such as anatomy, pathology, neurosciences, exercise physiology, biomechanics, musculoskeletal practice, research methods, and so on. In Canadian universities, academic courses at the master's level must include standard academic requirements, including course descriptions, learning objectives, and valid methods of assessment to determine credit (i.e., pass) or non-credit (i.e., fail) for each student. For example, in an academic course such as Professional Practice for Physiotherapists , the summative grade for each student completing the course might reflect the cumulative assessment of student learning in several components, such as a group project (30%), an individual student assignment (20%), a self-reflection paper (10%), and a final written exam (40%). On the clinical education side of the curriculum, we are fortunate to have dedicated PT clinicians who serve as teachers, referred to as preceptors or clinical instructors (CIs), of MPT students engaged in full-time clinical practice courses. These courses possess the same mandatory components as academic courses, including credit-unit designations, stated student learning outcomes, and defined pass–fail criteria for various levels of internship. The assessment of student performance in each clinical placement must, therefore, be measured and reported using a practical, reliable, and valid instrument—not only from the student's perspective, but from the CI's perspective as well. Hence, there is a lot resting on each clinical placement. In fact, many provincial PT regulatory bodies, given their mandate of protecting the public interest, publish practice guidelines pertaining to clinical supervision of student learners, acknowledging that quality clinical education is vital to the future provision of relevant, safe, and effective PT services by entry-level practitioners. 2 Over …