Pepas, what's that?
| The Pepas project aims to set up a Pan European Practical Assessment system. In a previous Leonardo pilot project (DASVENT) an accreditation system for veterinary nurse programmes has been set up successfully. As part of this project, an agreed set of practical learning outcomes (the Dossier of European Competencies) was developed. These underpin all accredited programmes, bringing about a standard baseline approach to veterinary nurse clinical training. | However, whilst the system evaluates the quality of delivered programmes, it does not call for a standardised approach to competence assessment. This means that assessment strategies vary across programmes and some place limited emphasis on practical competence assessment. The assessment of safe practical performance is paramount in veterinary nurse training and education. A standardisation of the assessment strategies will increase the | possibilities for students to follow part of their education programme in a foreign country. To be able to do this, and also make the competence level of these nurses transparent for all employers, we want to create a Pan European Practical Assessment system The Dossier of European Competences was developed by the project partners of DASVENT, but ultimately approved of by the foundation ACOVENE. ACOVENE is an advising partner in PEPAS. |
PEPAS introduction from the Norwegian
School of Veterinary Sciences
| By Anne Torgersen and Turid Hegerstrøm The Norwegian School of Veterinary Science (NVH) attended the first examiner training session in Kolding, Denmark. We sent 2 representatives, Anne Torgersen, Program Director and Turid Hegerstrøm, Program Coordinator. NVH already has a final practical examination in place, but we are looking to change our final exam as we have increased our intake of students and the exam we have at this date, is too time consuming and resource consuming. The form of our present exam is briefly as follows: 90 minute practical with live animal and with or without owner present. Question may vary from taking radiographs for hip dysplasia, to anaesthesia of a cat submitted for spaying. They may also get a practical equine task. Directly following the practical exam they undergo a 60 minute oral exam. | We feel that we can make good use of the ’OSCE’ form of practical assessment in our program and also feel that it is an important and natural sequel to the Dasvent project. Additionally, it is a good way of assessing students on the Dossier of European Competences developed through Dasvent. The training session in Kolding was very usefull and enabled us to see even more clearly than before the advantages and usefullness of this form of assessment. We are now able to write tasks more efficiently as we think along different lines and in a more ’stepby- step’ fashion. Writing tasks before the training session did not seem difficult, but after the training session we definitely see that in order to be able to write good tasks one needs to undergo training. It also enabled us to see the method of training and after undergoing the training and being both examiner and student, it will make it much easier for us to train examiners at our school adequately. | We are planning on implementing this examination as soon as practically possible. We hope to be able to use OSCE’s as a midway assessment aswell as a final assessment. For our final year students we are planning on having them undertake an OSCE examination aswell as maintaining our oral examination. For our midway assessment we are planning on using this assessment as an evaluation of the students’ practical skills before they go out on clinic placements. This will give us a good evaluation of their practical skills at an early stage, the students will have undergone an assessment before they go out into practice and will give us the ability to make any corrections, follow-ups or adjustments to the practical training of individual students at an early stage, thus not relying exclusively on the evaluation they receive at their clinics. We are looking forward to continuing work on this project and are very optimistic about the outcome and results. |
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Conference in June
From 11-13 June 2009 there will be a PEPAS conference in the Netherlands. In the lovely village Lunteren (close to Barneveld). we’ll meet eachother and find out what we all achieved so far in the project and what it takes to come anyfurther. The first and the last day of the conference is only open for project partners. Friday the 12th however is open for everybody who’s interested. For further details contact Alida Moene (see further)
We are doing the best we can to prepare aninteresting conference and hope to see all of you in June!
Practical examiner training at Hansenberg
By Dorte Windeløv
I am a veterinarian and I work as a lecturer in the veterinary nursing educational team at HANSENBERG College, Denmark. It was my task as a contact person for the PEPAS project to organize all the practical tasks in relation to the four day training course in January. As we don’t have a described practical examination in the Danish education for the time being we were hoping to get some ideas about how to implement something like the OSCE system into future final examinations. According to the executive order from the Ministry of education and the educational curriculum the Danish students have to make an individually practical orientated project and will be orally examined in this.
7 from the Danish staff were to participate in the course. The rest of the examiner trainees consisted of Maria and Kerstin from SLU, Turid and Anne from NVH and Maurizio from ABIVET, a total of 12 persons. Julie and Vicky came over from RCVS in the UK to lead the training.
In order to get everything ready for the course we learned that it is very time consuming and a lot of work. E-mails back and forth between us and RCVS with info on equipment to be used (and bought), many attached sheets that had to be printed and copied, booking of the appropriate classrooms and facilities months in advance and of course coffee and lunches to be ordered. We were impressed by the efficiency and thoroughness showed by Julie and Vicky from RCVS. And the hard work didn’t stop here. We were expected to prepare ourselves by reading and filling in a prequalification examination. Time for this has to be found in between your daily routines. I also chose to translate all the tasks into Danish for the sake of the students – this turned out to be very useful. I got a lot of help from my colleagues in handling the requests for clinical and laboratory equipment and also regarding the x-ray machine which wasn’t the same as the one in the RCVS tasks! We found that perhaps half the tasks we picked to be used had to have alterations regarding differences in equipment or routines - something we have to take into consideration when using the same tasks in different countries.
We had to use very basic tasks since our voluntary students had just started on the basic program. We had a small but very enthusiastic group of students; some of them even insisted on participating in the test examination all three times! It was actually quite difficult to assemble a group of serious students for the training examination, since they had to put a lot of work into it along with their normal school days and work. This was probably the most difficult part of the preparations for the course.
We learned a lot during the four days. The first day was with theory on the OSCE system and demonstration by video and Vicky and Julie as live performers. On the second day we had to examine and be examined by ourselves in the training group, and in the afternoon the nervous students would go through all the tasks. You really have to learn your task to give a fair evaluation and see all the details. On the second examination day we tried it all again but this time also as observers. The last day we had to work on developing new tasks for the dossier of competence. We split into small groups and worked on different tasks. It is not as easy as it looks. We had to try them out practically and this was done for the whole group and filmed. The tasks were discussed afterwards. Aspects of work environment and security were put to attention. It is very important that you try out the task practically, and make alterations while you work on it.
A list of topics to be discussed at later training courses and conferences were made during the final evaluation of the course.
The Pepas Easter Egg...
Spring is in the air, Easter is almost upon us. I would like to share a little Easter story with you.
Once upon a time there was a Barneveld chicken (very famous egg-laying breed), that wanted more out of her life. The farmer she belonged her, just wanted her to lay eggs, and lots of them, but she felt she could do better. She wanted to lay the ultimate egg, that everybody wanted to see, and where the Easter Bunny could be proud off. So she took off, exploring the rest of Europe, searching for the ultimate egg.
Our little chicken went to lot of other countries: the UK, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, Denmark, Norway and Slovenia. She found different coloured eggs - sometimes even spotted eggs - , different egg shells – very delicate and very robust – and different sizes. But in the end they were all eggs, and each egg contained egg white and egg yolk. And every chicken was very proud of its own layed offspring, but realized that they hadn’t produced the ultimate Easter egg.
So our European chickens decided to share their knowledge about laying eggs, hoping that together they could improve the quality of their production. They cackled, chattered , chirped and clucked. And then they went home and started laying the ultimate Easter egg. With a colourful shell that everybody liked, a perfect thickness, and realizing that the inside of the egg was already good.
And out came the Easter egg, which they called “Pepas”. Ready to hatch anytime now… what kind of little chicken will come out.
As project manager I’m very proud of what we all have achieved so far. In Norway, Sweden, Italy and Denmark we have trained practical examiners, and right now all of them are working very hard on creating European practical exams. Further on in this newsletter you will hear from them to get a glimpse of their experiences.
On June 12th 2009 you are all very welcome to meet our project partners on the open day of our Pepas conference, held in the Netherlands. If you are interested, please don’t hesitate to contact me at alida.moene@groenhorstcollege.nl or visit our website at www.pepas.net
Happy Easter!
Alida Moene, project manager.
