Background: The importance of assessing student learning outcomes has demanded attention from most everyone involved in the higher education enterprise, as accreditation and funding implications are often linked to the results. Faculty, however, are often critical of the assessment process because outcomes assessment is costly with regard to time, energy and other resources, and evidence of its...

The authors describe the development of the undergraduate medical curriculum at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, especially over the last 15 years, when they led the Curriculum Committee. They describe the principles that have guided the curriculum development process up to this day; how the competency outcomes were designed and evolved as well as the main influences on the process; how th...

The importance of reliable exposure assessment, as a key component of the overall risk assessment process, has been well described for some considerable time. Yet, despite this widely accepted tenet, many studies conclude significant adverse health effects, with associated public policy implications, in the absence of adequate or, in some cases, even rudimentary, exposure quantification. Moreov...

Risk assessment differs from other medical interventions in that the welfare of the patient is not the immediate object of the intervention. However, improving the risk assessment process may reduce the chance of risk assessment itself being unjust. We explore the ethical arguments in relation to risk assessment as a medical intervention, drawing analogies, where applicable, with ethical argume...

We describe the formative assessment process, using an approach based on social learning theory, for the development of a school-based obesity-prevention intervention into which cultural perspectives are integrated. The feasibility phase of the Pathways study was conducted in multiple settings in 6 American Indian nations. The Pathways formative assessment collected both qualitative and quantit...

As the preceding chapter suggests, vocational educators are likely to find more than one assessment strategy that will serve their purpose. Two important criteria for deciding which assessment to use in a particular situation are the quality of the information provided and the feasibility of the assessment process. This chapter describes these criteria and compares selectedand constructed-respo...

The needs assessment process is indeed complex in the social service context. Whereas most contexts can start with a presumption of "no need," the social service context frequently must start with an assumption of "need met-->change." In addition, underlying values--the individual's, the assessor's, the society's--all play a part in the judgment process. The assumption that the involvement of a...

The idea that learning disabilities are the result of deficiencies in one or more of the basic psychological processes required for learning is a core concept that needs to be maintained. However, problems in the application of traditional process-oriented approaches to diagnosis and treatment of learning disabilities suggest a need to alter the manner in which these basic processes are concept...

In the field of forensic human factors, experts are often called upon to assess and evaluate the adequacy of new or existing products' warnings or warnings systems. The usual goal of this evaluation is to arrive at a simple binary decision regarding the warning in question (i.e., does it "pass/fail", or is it "adequate/inadequate"). However, such a warning assessment process may in fact be quit...

Automatic detection of keywords and general topics is a specialpurpose auxiliary task in the website quality assessment process. We describe the approach to obtaining such information used in the MedIEQ project, discuss problems related to the type of human language used in medical websites, and illustrate them on examples.