Competency Verification in the Health Professions Via Limited Focus Measurement

As American health professionals attempt to create assessment mechanisms to verify the competencies of practitioners, they are discovering that traditional norm-refer enced measurement strategtes are inappro priate. However , in their subsequent adoption of criterion-referenced measure ment strategies they have learned that these highly descriptive measures more clearly reveal not only what is being measured, but also what is not being measured. To create reliable assessment procedures for competency verification, a limited focus conception of measurement is proposed wherein manageable numbers of high-import competencies are validly assessed.