Floor van Rosse is associate professor of medicine education and cluster lead Assessment ErasmusArts 2030 at Erasmus MC. She is assessment fan and, after several MicroLabs, a CLI fellowship and obtaining her SUTQ and SEQ qualifications, a familiar face in the Risbo corridors. She talks about ErasmusMC's new medicine curriculum, in which programmatic assessment is a key component. ErasmusMC worked closely with several Risbo trainers and advisors to prepare the teaching staff for a new way of developing, grading and evaluating.
A good thing
“Assessment has gripped me from the beginning,” Floor explains. "I get very happy when I come across good examples that make me think: yes, here we are really demonstrating that - in my field - students are prescribing well as doctors. But there are also plenty of situations where there's just room for improvement." Grinning, she adds, "So I also enjoy reviewing assessment questions, while plenty of colleagues consider that pure corvee. That might make me an odd duck. I think assessment is really an important part of education, and it should be much less separate from it. That's why I think programmatic assessment is so interesting, and a good thing."
EA2030
ErasmusArts2030 is a new curriculum that works according to the ideas of programmatic assessment. Quite a job: because it involved the redesign of three full bachelor years. Floor looks back: "We started in September 2024 and are now well on our way. We now notice that some processes can still be improved, so we are refining them. It is quite pioneering, and searching for what works and is feasible: ideally we want to give everyone the best customization, but that is a challenge given the large numbers of students ánd a curriculum with large knowledge components."
Learning from others
Few (medicine) bachelors in the Netherlands still work entirely with programmatic assessment. "Of course, where possible, we use the insights from our own master's, which has been assessing this way for some time. The master's is somewhat different in structure, though, and has many workplace assessments in the clerkships, which the bachelor's does not have. We have benefited greatly from our contacts with Maastricht University and Utrecht University, for example because of their bachelor's in Care, Health and Society, which also works this way." Floor also talks about the special contact with Professor Anna Ryan of the University of Melbourne: "They have a programmatic assessment program in their bachelor of medicine, including a student dashboard. We wanted that too. The contact with Anna really gave us the confidence that it was feasible." They also benefit greatly from the contacts in the national learning network programmatic assessment. "Implementing programmatic assessment requires a new way of thinking, and then it is nice to exchange experiences and learn from others. Besides, it's a waste of your time to reinvent the wheel when others have already done it."
Paradigm shift
"The move to programmatic assessment is not just a curriculum change - it really is a paradigm shift, both for teachers and students. Teachers have to learn to rely on programmatic assessment and let go of the grip of grades, even though those grades may not have been all that meaningful. And students have to get used too: they come from high school, where everything is about grades. They ask, "What do I have to get to pass? But passing and failing are really no longer words in this curriculum."
"The thinking behind programmatic assessment doesn't land overnight; it takes time. So teacher professionalization and guidance is key. If you don't do that, you won't get anything done. We have fully committed to this, and Risbo has guided us well in this area. But also in the coming year we will have to pay plenty of attention to this topic."
Student dashboard
"We are very happy with our student dashboard. It is not strictly speaking a portfolio, but it is a very nice place where all the feedback comes together: it gives students an overview and helps them with their development. They make their own reflection reports and a development plan, and upload them in Osiris. The dashboard is also linked to Ans, which makes the processes stronger. "It's nice to see how the case-based teaching is working now and which feedback we get from students. They feel more seen, have a better understanding of their learning and talk easily about their studies with their VIP coach."
Decision committee
"I am especially proud of our well-trained decision committee, now led by Iris de Graaf. Risbo's role has been very big in training and guiding all the teachers, but certainly also in setting up this committee. This has really been a pioneering process, with Marit van Nieuwenhuys and Riekje de Jong working together very intensively. They developed challenging dummy courses to make it difficult for the decision committee during training and simulation sessions. That preparation is now paying off: there is still a lot to learn, but during the first decision moment it turned out that we were very much on the same page with our decisions." Apart from the substantive contribution, Risbo's added value was also in their independence: “It's nice to work with expert people from the outside during such a long-term transition, who don't get sucked into daily practice.”
Future prospects
"I would love it if we could say goodbye to the binding study advice in the future. And I am looking forward to further developing our dashboard, for which I won a Senior Comenius Fellowship together with Suzanne Peeters! So much is still possible: Think of functionalities like targeted advising, clear summaries of feedback on partial competencies, personalized communication and stronger visualizations. Technology, especially AI, can really play a role in that. We are far from exploiting that potential to the fullest, but that's exactly where I see the future."
Author: Hanna van Impelen-Emmering
