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As 91����’s first cohort of physical therapy students prepares to graduate in May 2026, students in the three-year Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) program are eager to pass their licensure exam and enter the workforce.

Fortunately, these students in the Division of Physical Therapy at Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences have an advantage: a clear understanding of their performance, thanks to B-Competent, a dashboard created at 91���� that displays competency-based assessment data to DPT students.

Several health professions have adopted a concept known as competency-based education (CBE), which enables students to demonstrate their mastery of skills or competencies within a defined set of performance outcomes. Physical therapy education is moving toward a CBE approach, a transition that Michael Buck, founding director of 91����’s Division of PT, has championed.

“When I came to 91����, it was my vision to have a framework of competency-based education,” he said. “It was also critical to have a dashboard that would provide students with actionable feedback about their progress.”

B-Competent is the realization of that goal. Collaboratively developed by Buck and several PT faculty members, Decker College Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs Jean Dorak and her graduate assistant Rimjhim Singh, and the University’s Information Technology Services (ITS) Innovation Team, B-Competent provides students with information about their progress toward achieving entry-level skills. In physical therapy education (and some other medical training programs), these are called entrustable professional activities (EPAs), which are observable and measurable clinical tasks that represent the daily work of a PT professional. Students must be able to perform EPAs safely by the end of the DPT program.

When evaluating EPAs, ongoing, formative assessments are conducted by different evaluators across multiple assessment opportunities. B-Competent tracks this assessment data, offering analytics to students, faculty and coaches (faculty members assigned as mentors to each student). This enables faculty to provide students with constructive feedback on their development and informs students about their progress toward meeting competencies. Students see only their own performance metrics.

“The students are getting multiple data points from various assessors at different times in different contexts to create a clear picture of how they perform as clinicians,” explained Denise Romano, assistant professor of physical therapy and a certified healthcare simulation educator. “The dashboard shows students, ‘This is where you’re expected to be at this point in time in the program, and where you’re supposed to be the following semester and the semester after that.’”

Although students receive feedback on their coursework, the data provided through B-Competent is the only competency-based assessment data linked to programmatic competencies that the DPT students receive. This feedback differs from the traditional letter or numeric grades that students are used to.

The B-Competent dashboard uses three graphs to display students’ progress toward achieving performance outcomes:

• Comprehensive graphs show the deviation of student performance levels from expected milestones on all of the 26 competencies. A zero deviation indicates the student is “on track.”

• Progression graphs display student performance levels for each competency alongside the established target across all semesters of the DPT program.

• Radar graphs show where the student is expected to be at that particular point in his or her education, along with where the student scored in that EPA based on the student’s performance during an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). In the future, performance data may also be derived from in-course and clinical-education assessments.

“Each semester, we complete OSCEs in the simulation lab where we perform a mock physical therapy evaluation or treatment in either an inpatient or outpatient setting,” explained Jaret Beyer, a third-year DPT student. “Faculty observe in real time and assess us on specific competencies. Those results are then reflected in the dashboard, which helps us clearly identify areas where we’re meeting or exceeding expectations, as well as areas that need further development.”

A paradigm shift

CBE emphasizes the development of clinical skills, communication and humanistic qualities, not just academic grades. It highlights the importance of applying knowledge in real patient care, using tools such as feedback and coaching to help students identify strengths and areas for improvement.

“The CBE approach focuses on cultivating adaptable, competent clinicians who can think critically, communicate effectively and make sound decisions in clinical settings,” Buck said.

However, CBE requires that students and educators rethink their views on assessment. No longer are students comparing themselves to other students; instead, they’re comparing their progress in mastering competencies.

“One of the challenges with CBE is that students and educators are accustomed to a norm-referenced assessment system, where students are compared to other students and placed on a bell curve. This is all they have known since kindergarten, so it’s a paradigm shift,” Romano said.

The road to the dashboard

In April 2024, Buck reached out to Jean Dorak to propose the idea of an assessment dashboard. Dorak discussed the issue with Singh, a master’s student in computer science at 91����’s Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science, who was working as her graduate assistant.

Singh was intrigued by the idea and excited for the opportunity. First, she and Dorak met with Buck to gain a better understanding of the project goals and brainstorm design ideas, student-facing graphs and faculty data input methods. An iterative process involving numerous discussions was used to align the tool with the needs and feedback of the PT faculty.

Starting with initial requirements and discussions, Singh led the pilot phase development. This involved programming the application using Python, Flask and JavaScript, and translating the Figma wireframes into the final production code.

By fall 2024, Phase 1 of the application was ready. Personalized feedback summaries and graphs in PDF format, based on their OSCE experiences, were provided to each student.

Adding a secure login system was the next step, and the team decided the application should be hosted behind the University’s secure portal, My91����. To ensure the application could run smoothly within that framework, the Decker team collaborated with the ITS Innovation team. This required rewriting the original application, which was created in Python, to match My91����’s required JavaScript framework.

Singh continued as a key collaborator, working closely with ITS to develop Phase 2. The ITS Innovation Team provided a substantial boost in technical expertise, access to the 91���� servers, and excellent support from developers and project managers.

Phase 2 — the enhanced platform, hosted on 91���� servers with secure login and access protocols — was launched in April.

A useful tool

The assessment data helps DPT students facilitate open and productive conversations with their coaches and faculty about targeted strategies for improvement.

“It allows me to clearly identify areas where I need further development and align my studying and practice with those needs,” Beyer said. “It also helps validate my own self-reflection, ensuring that the skills I believe I’m strong or weak in are accurately represented.”

Fellow third-year student Samantha Mason ’19 agrees: “It’s nice to have what is going well acknowledged, but even more important to hear about my shortcomings. Without understanding the areas where I struggle, I can’t effectively work toward improvement.”

Moving forward

ITS continues working with Decker College to expand and enhance B-Competent, aiming to support more divisions within Decker College and potentially other colleges across the University in future phases.

“It was incredibly exciting to have the chance to create something entirely new and so forward-thinking, specifically with our students’ success in mind,” Dorak said. “This significant innovation is built on a strong, strategic foundation. It has been a dynamic process over the last year and a half, with the system currently in a phase of continuous improvement as we actively incorporate feedback and scale it for successful adoption across all college divisions.”

According to Dorak, B-Competent was designed to support the onboarding of multiple divisions due to its flexibility and adaptable nature. Each discipline could have its own version to define “competencies” in its own way; for example, what nursing calls a “competency” may function more like a “skills check” in PT.

Additionally, the Division of Physical Therapy is exploring other ways to improve the system: for example, making it easier for external physical therapists who act as clinical instructors or volunteer assessors during OSCEs to directly enter feedback into the dashboard, which is currently not possible because the application is hosted on 91����’s secure portal.

“It would also be great if we could develop a mobile app that is shareable with the larger physical therapy education community,” Romano said. “And, I’d like to have a two-way interface so students could input information, such as their reflections on the feedback they receive or answers to questions prior to coaching sessions.”

As complex as the road to launching this application has become, Buck’s goals remain simple: “I want to make something that makes PT education better for everyone.”