The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation is proposing a new request for applications (RFA) to support demonstration projects to develop, implement, and evaluate innovative strategies for enhancing fairness in learner assessment in medical and nursing education programs. Funded projects will serve as exemplars for how schools of medicine and nursing can implement strategies that center the purpose of assessment, which is not to distinguish among learners but to ensure that everyone who graduates is fully prepared to provide the highest standard of care to their patients.
Harmful bias and discrimination in learner assessment was the focus of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation’s 2022 conference, entitled Ensuring Fairness in Medical Education Assessment. The purpose of both the conference and its resulting consensus recommendations was to address documented bias and discrimination in assessment that impede learners’ opportunities to fulfill their potential as health professionals and, ultimately, improve quality of care for all patients. In addition, the importance of developing new systems of assessment aligns with the increasing emergence of competency-based educational frameworks in medicine and nursing education, which require new assessment programs and practices. Building on the Macy conference, there has been additional important scholarship on what this next era of assessment might look like, which has provided useful ideas for how to advance equitable and valuable assessment for learners.
The goal of this RFA is to provide support to projects who advance assessment approaches which empower learners to understand their own unique learning needs, position them as lifelong learners, and keep them focused on achieving the ultimate goal of their health professions education: namely, to provide the highest quality of care for their patients.
The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation proposes to support three innovative projects in medicine or nursing education programs. Each project would receive $200,000 over two years to design, implement, and evaluate innovative learner assessment programs aligned with the 2022 Macy Conference recommendations and additional scholarship in this field. This includes the use of data, learning analytics, and technology to develop and advance systems-based assessment approaches that ensure fairness for physicians and nurses in training.
This RFA is open to schools of medicine and nursing (both undergraduate and graduate). Projects should focus on interventions in the clinical learning environment. Collaborations across institutions and departments are strongly encouraged to support spread and replicability, as is co-creation with learners.