Case-Ex II
The aim of the project has been to study three interlinked research questions (adaptation of Web-SP simulated patient software for assessment; applicability in medicine; flexibility to be used in teacher education) in four different settings (KI – nursing; Stanford – medicine; Umeå – teacher education; Stanford – teacher education).
Even though we have worked in four parallel tracks at three separate universities, the project has been very successful and has delivered concrete results faster than anticipated. One scientific paper and three conference presentations have been published.
The full annual project report is available as a pdf document
Medical Tracks
Specific results of the two medical tracks:
- New quality assured cases in medicine (SU) and nursing (KI) have been developed
- Preliminary assessment/grading principles have been discussed and formulated
- Case-Ex cases created and pilot tests with students are scheduled (April/August/May 2006)
- New specific research questions are formulated to be studied in Case-Ex II
- A preliminary list of requirements for adapting Web-SP to better suit assessment has been drafted
- A dedicated Case-Ex website has been set up, with examples from all four tracks: http://websp.lime.ki.se/caseex
- One full paper [Zary & Fors 2006] has been published and three conference presentations have been submitted [Botezatu et al 2006a + b, Zary et al 2006].
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Teacher Education tracks
- Results so far in the teacher education tracks:Two separate Web-SP teacher education interfaces have been developed.
- Specific cases in counseling (Umeå) and mathematics (SU) have been scripted.
- Cases are now being implemented
- Field tests fixed in time and scope
- A large base of experience has been developed in terms of flexibility issues and general assessment principles
- One conference presentation performed [Edelbring & Fors 2005] and one full paper under preparation
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Insights ...
The first six months of Case-Ex project has been very effective and some tracks are actually ahead of time. However, there have also been some complications leading to discovery of new important fields calling for further investigation.
One obvious problem is the large difference between the medical domain case scenarios in comparison with the teacher education domain scenarios. A second problem is the difference between the two separate teacher education tracks of counseling and mathematics. Even though Web-SP seems flexible enough to harbor the teacher education cases, those cases needed to be forced into a format that was not necessarily the best. The evaluation during the two planned field tests will study this in detail.
An important new research question which covers most disciplines is the one of finding effective and proper scoring and grading schemes. This is very important to study and evaluate in the next phase of the Case-Ex project.
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CaseExII_Report.pdf
