Practice assessment documentation for midwifery programmes: A scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Practice assessment documentation is a critical component of midwifery education globally, to ensure students meet regulatory standards for clinical proficiency. However, variations in documentation, grading criteria, and assessor interpretation have led to inconsistencies in student assessment. This scoping review maps existing literature evaluating midwifery practice assessment documentation, synthesises the evidence, and identifies gaps. METHODS: A scoping review was conducted following the JBI methodology, including searches in CINAHL, MEDLINE, Embase, MIDIRS, Web of Science, Scopus, APA PsycInfo, and Education Research Complete. Gray literature sources, reference lists, and systematic review databases were also screened. Studies evaluating midwifery practice assessment documentation in clinical education across Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, and EU member states were included. Data extraction followed a narrative synthesis approach. RESULTS: Nine articles met the inclusion criteria, including seven primary research articles, one national report, and one conference presentation. Key themes identified included validity and reliability of documentation and assessment tools, training, time, language and consistency. Several articles highlighted the need for nationalised assessment tools, with some evidence suggesting that standardisation can improve reliability and feedback quality. CONCLUSION: The review highlights ongoing challenges in midwifery assessment, emphasising the need for standardised, user-friendly documentation that ensures consistency and reliability. Ensuring that midwifery assessment effectively captures both clinical competencies and professional attitudes is essential to fostering well-rounded, competent practitioners ready to meet the demands of contemporary midwifery practice. While nationalised tools show promise, further research is required to assess their impact on student learning and assessor' confidence.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".