CRADLE Fellowship Appointment: Congratulations to Dr Jemma Skeat

14 June 2022

CRADLE is pleased to announce Dr Jemma Skeat as a recipient of a CRADLE Fellowship. Our Fellowships are awarded to build an individual’s education research capacity in assessment and/or digital learning. Jemma is a Senior Lecturer in Health Professions Education (Assessment) at Deakin’s School of Medicine.

In this post we hear from Jemma as she outlines her project ‘Co-designing effective feedback: working with students and academics as collaborators to purposefully design feedback from clinical assessment’.

Jemma’s Project

I am very excited by the opportunity presented by the CRADLE Fellowship. My project will focus on feedback to students from the Objective Structured Clinical Exams (OSCEs) within the School of Medicine. Students across the School undertake this type of examination which has a very practical and applied focus. The feedback that students get from this examination could be directly applicable to their clinical work in placements or once they graduate.

The study will build on previous research in the area of student feedback, including work done by CRADLE researchers. The study will use Participatory Design methods to enable student and academic involvement in the design of feedback. Participatory Design is one of several co-design methods that emphasise collaboration, where the knowledge of all groups is brought into a design process. The co-design of feedback for OSCEs includes considering both:

• feedback information – what information is provided as ‘feedback’ and parameters around this such as content, focus, and mode, and
• feedback processes – how students use this information, considering two-way feedback dialogues, contexts and relationships.

About Jemma

Jemma works in the School of Medicine as a Senior Lecturer in Health Professions Education (Assessment). In this role she leads the School Assessment Leadership Team (SALT). The SALT provide leadership and support for high quality assessment and evaluation practices across the School of Medicine. The SALT work with academic teams to lead the design, delivery, and evaluation of best-practice assessment programs across the major programs in the School. Jemma’s background is in speech pathology and her interests include clinical learning and assessment, interdisciplinary teaching and learning and qualitative research and synthesis.

For more information on CRADLE Fellowships, please visit here.