Medical and Health Science Educational Research

Summary

More about Associate Professor Chris Roberts Stay in touch

Chris welcomes expressions of interest from doctoral candidates with interests in medical and health science education, with a particular focus on clinical learning, assessment and professionalism. He is especially interested in supervising research students who undertake, a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research around teacher/supervisors' and/or students/trainees' thinking about the practices of assessment. Theses by publication are preferred.

Supervisor

Associate Professor Chris Roberts.

Research location

North Shore - Northern Clinical School

Program type

Masters/PHD

Synopsis

My own research focus is on student and postgraduate trainee assessment, informed by psychometric theory, with a special focus on the impact of educational assessment on learning.

Informed by social psychology theory, I focus on measuring performance, professional behaviours, and investigating how assessment is understood by students/trainees, teachers/supervisors, and all those with an interest in the outcomes of medical and health science education.

I am interested in the way that the clinical education settings most powerfully influence the practices of assessment and impacts on preparation for clinical practice. For example, current topics of interest include:

1. How do we demonstrate technical adequacy in reporting aggregates of complex clinical performance-based assessments e.g. portfolios and understanding how they enhance student learning.
2. What is the relationship of interviewers' conceptions of assessment to their decision-making in admission interviews and the impact of those beliefs and practices on the fairness of student/trainee selection?
3. Informed by Systems Learning Theory, what is the relationship between the degree to which a student or trainee is socially networked within a clinical education setting and their performance in clinical assessments.
4. To what extent does ta self assessment of clinical reasoning capability indicate vulnerability to medical error

Additional information

Chris is also a general practitioner and undertakes collaborative research in health services research particularly in aged care.

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Opportunity ID

The opportunity ID for this research opportunity is 1364