Point of view: Competency-based assessment for the training of PhD students and early-career scientists
- Pennsylvania State University, United States
- Albert Einstein College of Medicine, United States
- Thomas Jefferson University, United States
- University of Florida Health Sciences Center, United States
Abstract
The training of PhD students and early-career scientists is largely an apprenticeship in which the trainee associates with an expert to become an independent scientist. But when is a PhD student ready to graduate, a postdoctoral scholar ready for an independent position, or an early-career scientist ready for advanced responsibilities? Research training by apprenticeship does not uniformly include a framework to assess if the trainee is equipped with the complex knowledge, skills and attitudes required to be a successful scientist in the 21st century. To address this problem, we propose competency-based assessment throughout the continuum of training to evaluate more objectively the development of PhD students and early-career scientists.
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Michael F Verderame
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The authors declare that there was no funding for this work.
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© 2018, Verderame et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Point of view: Competency-based assessment for the training of PhD students and early-career scientists
eLife 7:e34801.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.34801
