An Authentic, Practice-Based Assessment as a Catalyst for Continuous Professional Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last ten years, pharmacy practice has changed significantly in Canada. It is more important than ever to ensure that the profession engages in continuing professional development in order to keep up with changing practice and changing public demand and scrutiny. The question is, how do we ensure that the required continual professional development occurs and is applied to practice? One Canadian regulator, the Ontario College of Pharmacists, has attempted to address this question by assessing the success of a number of quality assurance options in terms of addressing the competence of pharmacists, and by extension their ability to learn and apply their learning in an ongoing manner. This case study presents three policy options; an analysis of those options; and finally, an evaluation of the best option for this regulator. The policy alternatives considered include a continuing education/professional development requirement, standardized simulated assessment (i.e., observed structured clinical examination) and authentic practice-based assessment. For the Ontario College of Pharmacists, an authentic practice-based assessment approach seems effective at stimulating quality improvements in pharmacists' practice, likely because the assessment acts as a catalyst for pharmacists to engage in continuing professional development in order to maintain competence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".