The issue: Equipping tertiary health promotion students with skills and knowledge to contribute meaningfully to the health promotion workforce begins with enhancing their health promotion competence via well-designed curriculum. This includes a focus on work-integrated learning, global citizenship, professional identity, and competency mapping in line with the IUHPE Core Competencies and Professional Standards for Health Promotion.

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Project summary: This project involves a mixed-methods prospective cohort study (2021-2024) to track undergraduate health promotion student progression across a redesigned Bachelor of Science in Health Promotion, to evaluate a new approach for assessing student achievement of the Competencies and Standards.

 

This research has the following objectives:

1. Examine student development of perceptions, awareness, knowledge and skills towards the Competencies and Standards;

2. Measure student development of global citizenship and professional identity;

3. Evaluate the utility of PebblePad; and

4. Provide a framework for undergraduate teaching and assessing the Competencies and Standards.

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Relevance for practice: Results will provide direction on strengthening health promotion discipline knowledge and skills and contribute to knowledge gaps in competency-based health promotion education to strengthen the health promotion workforce.

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Project progress: Baseline data have been collected from first-year students via document analysis of student reflection papers (n=40); and an online survey (n=29) to measure self-reported health promotion competence, development of global citizenship and professional identity, and PebblePad usability. Data collection for the second and third years of the study is underway, with results expected in 2024/5.

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Who is involved? 

• Investigators: Dr Krysten Blackford & Dr Gemma Crawford

• Project Officer: Malena Della Bona

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Project funding: This work is supported by Curtin University’s Learning Innovation and Teaching Excellence Centre’s 2022 iSoLT Small Grants Scheme. 

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Ethics approval: The Curtin University Human Research Ethics Committee approved the study (HRE2021-0169).

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Project outputs:

Presentations:

• Blackford, K., & Crawford, G. Using Twitter as a learning tool in an undergraduate health promotion course. WA Teaching and Learning Forum, 3-4 February 2022, Murdoch University.

 

Publications:

• Blackford, K., Portsmouth, L., Crawford, G., Burns, S., Jancey, J., & Leavy, J. (2022). The Health Promotion Curriculum: Evolving and embedding competencies in contemporary courses. In International Handbook of Teaching and Learning Health Promotion. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-96005-6_8.

• Blackford, K., Della Bona, M., & Crawford, G. (2023). Passport to Practice: Investigating development of core competencies in undergraduate Health Promotion students. Global Health Promotion (under review).