Assessing Skills and Abilities through Oral and Practical Exams

Assessing Skills and Abilities through Oral and Practical Exams is organized by American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA).

Overview:
As an educator, you focus your energy on teaching massage therapy students the knowledge and skills you know they are going to need in order to succeed in the massage therapy profession. Then, students are assessed on how well they process this information.

As a profession, we identify higher standards for student learning and performance in school and in the workplace after graduation. Quality methods of assessing performance help reach those goals. Most teachers of massage therapy are not trained as educators and therefore don’t know all of the educational tools that have been developed. This course is designed to help in one area—the performance assessment.

The learning objectives of this course explain how to align student assessments with the knowledge, skills and abilities they are expected to grasp from a course. In addition, this course provides useful feedback in identifying areas and methods of correcting existing courses.

This course explains the role of oral and practical assessments and how to amend current courses to align the information presented with the assessments.

Objectives:
When you finish this course, you will be able to:
• Align assessments with objectives and competencies in courses.
• Identify the plan and goals of an oral or practical assessment.
• Describe the criteria of fair and valid assessments.
• Assess three levels of both oral and practical assessments.
• Outline performance standards for an assessment.
• Define subjective skills and abilities.
• Distinguish between the four taxonomies using task terminology.
• Apply a rubric as a scoring tool.
• Explain the roles of content, student expectations and feedback in testing formats.