Assessment of professional performance: Maritime technologies, knowledge and educational practices in transformation

Research Project, 2019 – 2020

Maritime education serves as an illustrative example of a domain that during recent decades have gone through significant transformations: from a system of apprenticeship to an academic education where the time spent learning the work practice at sea is partly replaced by training in simulator environments. Today, maritime education is regulated by international standards for competencies and different types of certificates. This in turn poses challenges for educators to train competent master mariners and to use simulators in training and assessing professional performance.

The previous project "Training skills and assessing performance in simulation-based learning enviroments" contributes with knowledge on the practical accomplishment of training through ethnographic fieldwork and detailed video analyses of the instructors’ work in simulator environments. The current project shifts focus from the practical accomplishment of training towards the challenges of assessing and certifying professional performance identified in and through the previous project. A problem is that neither such scoring systems nor high-end technologies in themselves are able provide valid assessments of professional conduct. Hence, a prevailing pedagogical question is the instructors’ ability to bridge between feedback from assessment tools and the contingent character of skilled performance.

Through interviews and analyses of video recorded assessments in simulator environment the project explores a) how do new tools and criteria enter into existing assessment practices in the simulator environment? b) which pedagogical challenges can be identified when new tools and criteria for assessment is implemented? The project is expected to provide new knowledge about how the adaption of new technologies restructure how intelligent actions are being perceived and assessed.