April 14, 2008, by Teaching at Nottingham

Trigger exams: assessing decision making

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Paul Crawford: “And we have innovative assessments, such as the DVD trigger examination, which I introduced with colleagues a year ago, and is evaluated really well.

“If we’re going to assess students on their health communication, that’s not easy to do. You can’t really do that very easily within a school setting. So we filmed healthcare scenarios, short clips of healthcare scenarios, and this gave the students a sense of watching something really happening, and then they had to answer questions about what happened with communication in that clip, what response would they have made, and what did they think about healthcare delivery overall? And the students are telling us that that is very much like what they experience in practice, and they have to make decisions on the hoof. So it’s getting the students through to being able to make decisions about their communication, not simply regurgitating textbooks, and what the textbooks say.”

Paul Crawford
School of Nursing, Midwifery & Physiotherapy

This assessment in communication and care delivery is taken by all Diploma/ BSc (Hons) students at the end of Year 1 and as part of assessment in the Nursing Concepts and Skills for Practice 2 module. This video was originally published as part of PESL’s Teaching at Nottingham collection. Produced April 2008.

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