In summer, 2007 Dr. Cameron Crandall approached the Law School (University of New Mexico) about collaborating on a joint training program for domestic violence. Since I teach Family Law, I was very interested in new approaches to addressing the issue of Domestic Violence. Professors and staff from the medical school and a legal aid attorney who specializes in domestic violence collaborated with me and my teaching assistant to design four problems using actors posing as individuals with health issues and legal concerns related to domestic violence. These problems involved standardized patients and clients with various types of domestic violence issues. We used the problems in a pre-test and a post-test for our training sessions.
While I agreed to participate in this unique collaboration because of my interest in domestic violence, I received a totally unexpected benefit from the collaboration: I learned a great deal about assessment. Even though I actually participated in the Best Practices Project, had read the Carnegie Report, and had a strong intellectual interest in outcome-based assessment, this experience was extremely enlightening. I feel like I have a much better understanding of what it means to assess student’s performance by developing goals and criteria and evaluating it. Next post I will tell more of the story….