View article

Over the past decades, competency-based education has become the norm in the medical education continuum. The rise of competency-or outcomebased models of education has been paralleled by an increasing interest in workplace-based assessment (WBA) to provide direct evidence of proficiencies of interest (ie, what the trainee will ultimately do in professional practice). WBA has become a cornerstone in the summative assessment of learning and professional competence. Competency-based education, however, also calls for a greater emphasis on formative assessment, or assessment for learning. Frequent feedback on performance should effectively steer and foster the acquisition of the necessary competencies. It therefore seems beyond dispute that assessment programs in competency-based medical education need to combine summative and formative assessment purposes.

In this issue of the …