The mismatch between teaching and assessing professionalism: a practice architecture analysis of three professional programmes

Abstract

ABSTRACT While there is broad agreement about their importance, courses in professionalism have proven difficult to teach and assess. Furthermore, there is currently a lack of knowledge regarding problems that are common across professional boundaries. The purpose of this article is to examine what teaching and assessing professionalism in higher education entails in three distinctly different professional education contexts in Sweden: medical, police, and social-work education. The study is qualitative and comparative, with data consisting of documents (curricula, syllabi, course content n > 200), interviews (n = 18), and participant observations (∼30 h) of how professionalism is taught and assessed in each programme. The results describe the practice architectures of teaching and assessing professionalism, where problems and dilemmas are made visible. The results also show a tension between the ambition to practise and the ambition to assess, which leads to what we call ‘assessment avoidance’.