Dr Jarlath O’Donohoe
To truly know whether our learners are achieving what we want them to achieve we should assess them in the setting that we expect these skills to be delivered.
Miller’s pyramid depicts four levels of learning which a student of a subject must pass through to truly perform: “knows”, “knows how”, “shows how” and “does”.
In the Neonatal Care Course, our novice learners gather facts and take an MCQ paper to “show that they know”. Workshops, discussion groups, skills sessions and simulations get them to the orange and green levels. The local champion and trained instructors then take over from NICHE for the “Performance Integrated into Practice” level at the top of the pyramid, completing the trainees’ journey from novice to expert.
I would like to see time better represented in this model. International NICHE instructors can skim the surface of the first 3 bands in one course but to achieve the competence and automacity inherent in the blue band at the top of the hierarchical model requires time, experience and supervised practice that only a local faculty can contribute to.