Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Teaching to the Test?

If you knew there was an end-of-program test that would measure your students’ comprehensive knowledge from you entire program, and make the results public, would you teach differently than you do now? “No,” is the answer BC instructor Randy Williams gives, and he practices what he preaches.

Williams is our paramedic program instructor. Recently, his last cohort of paramedic students all passed the national exams required for licensure. “I think I get more nervous than they do,” he says about the days when students take both a practical, clinical exam and another when they take a written exam all supervised by a national organization. But this time, he says he was not nervous about the group. “A calm came over me,” he says, “because I know they worked hard.”

Williams says he knows what the exams will cover, but his primary focus is on making sure that students understand the content and know what they are doing. “They will be working in the real world, after all,” he says. In other words, it doesn’t matter if a paramedic passed the exam if they do not know what they are doing when they get to the scene of an accident. But making classes rigorous prepares them not only for the job they will be doing but also for the test. This last year, with a slight nod to the nerve-racking demands of the licensure exam, Williams made classes even more demanding. The increased pressure better prepared them for the stress of the exam, he says, as well as the stress of the real-world job.

One of his chief means of instruction is the frequent use of case studies—from elaborate situations to shorter, simple situations—in which students must decide the next step: what drug to administer, what procedure to apply or any of a thousand, life-saving choices. The application of what they have learned to the scenarios not only ensures they know what to do when faced with that situation on the job, but develops their critical thinking skills and prepares them for the exam.

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