View article

In health professions education, assessment systems are bound to be rife with tensions as they must fulfil formative and summative assessment purposes, be efficient and effective, and meet the needs of learners and education institutes, as well as those of patients and health care organisations. The way we respond to these tensions determines the fate of assessment practices and reform. In this study, we argue that traditional ‘fix‐the‐problem’ approaches (i.e. either–or solutions) are generally inadequate and that we need alternative strategies to help us further understand, accept and actually engage with the multiple recurring tensions in assessment programmes.

Drawing from research in organisation science and health care, we outline how the Polarity Thinking™ model and its ‘both–and’ approach offer ways to systematically leverage assessment tensions as opportunities to drive …