Project Methodology

This project is an international cross-institutional project involving university programs and Speech Pathology Australia. Speech Pathology Australia is the peak professional body that accredits university programs to ensure that speech pathology graduates meet the minimum standards required to enter the profession. Eleven of the twelve university programs in speech pathology in Australia and New Zealand have agreed to participate in the project. This project will facilitate the implementation and embedding of COMPASS™  into speech pathology programs' learning and teaching practices nationally and internationally.

COMPASS™ is a new, valid and reliable assessment of speech pathology students’ performance in workplace settings. Use of COMPASS™ will allow individual programs to compare cohorts of students and develop criterion referenced, threshold standards of performance. Consequently they will be able to monitor the quality of their teaching, assessments, clinical experiences, and ultimately graduates over time. Benchmarking using COMPASS™ across speech pathology programs will assist in the maintenance of standards of clinical competency in graduates. Benchmarking will facilitate the identification and exchange of information about quality approaches to clinical education that maximise student competency development. It will also provide a comparable way of measuring outcomes from different clinical education curriculum structures and pedagogies The project outcomes will be achieved through support, training and collaboration with speech pathology programs and Speech Pathology Australia throughout 2006-2007.