Examining the Educational Values and Experiences of Lecturers in Relation to Viva Voce Examinations: An Exploratory Study Tina Moore, Nursing Division School of Health and Social Sciences,Marion Hinds, School of Nursing, Middlesex University, London, UK Overview: This is an exploratory study which examines the educational values and experiences of lecturers in relation to viva voce or oral examinations. Stream: Curriculum and Pedagogy

This session was focused on using Viva voces as part of a nursing curriculum but as a module assessment where a written assessment was not appropriate and there was a need to seek deeper learning from students in terms of their knowledge and how they applied this. Focus here on case studies of nursing patients and what the students had done.  They also wanted to be more creative and counter issues of plagiarism but there are concerns about time consuming nature of this tool

The study was at present focused on lecturers views to see if they thought it was valuable having used tis with 2 cohorts of 250 students.

There was a general consensus that it was valuable for determining theory practice links and what the student had really done. It was firmly placed in the real world and students could not just attempt surface learning. 

However there were concerns that students did not always use the right terminology and this seemed in some instances linked to practice so a role for development in practice as well and assessors were not always consistent.

There was a need to prepare students from the beginning of the programme if this was to be a valued assessment and use this informally from time to time and the importance of this as an assessment method needed to be clear to the students in terms of the need once they were qualified.

There was a good discussion of the issues around this sort of assessment and linked to some of our discussions around the curriculum module presentations.