Are health professional competency assessments transferable across cultures? A preliminary validity study

Abstract

This study investigated if professional competency assessments are transferable across cultures using COMPASS®: Competency assessment in speech pathology, a tool developed and validated in Australia. Students in Hong Kong were assessed by clinical educators using COMPASS® and the usual clinical evaluation forms. Analyses compared Hong Kong data with the original Australian field trial data. Rasch analysis was used to evaluate how well the ratings and score generated represented students’ development of competency. Hong Kong clinical educators’ ratings represented the same seven distinct categories of judgement as Australian clinical educators. The order of item difficulty was very similar for the two samples. However, Hong Kong clinical educators were not rating students in a pattern that reflected increasing competency with experience and very few year 4 students were rated at entry level. It is concluded that an assessment tool validated and developed in one culture may well support valid judgements and yield measures that can be used to judge student competency in another culture. Further evaluation is required to investigate the differences in the judgement of student progress in another culture and strengthen the validity of using its measures to judge students' competency performance.

Keywords:

• Clinical education
• clinical competency
• competency assessment
• speech language pathology

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank all the clinical educators and students who participated in the study. Special thanks to Dr. Stacie Attrill for her comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript.