Evaluating a teaching change? Record what actually happened

Imagine introducing feedback workshops on adjusting entries. Students attend, discussions seem productive and several say the sessions helped. At the end of the module, you want to know whether to retain them.

What have you established? Attendance tells you something about participation. Comments tell you something about students’ experience. Neither, by itself, shows whether students can now prepare and explain an adjustment independently.

A new reporting guideline puts this distinction at the centre of educational evaluation. In their 2026 paper in Perspectives on Medical Education, Aleda Chen and colleagues introduce CORE-HPE, a consensus-developed checklist for reporting competency-based health professions education outcomes research. This concerns integrated training systems that align learning, assessment and progression around demonstrated competence, not simply a new classroom activity.

The checklist’s 44 numbered items and additional subitems ask authors to make educational design, intended mechanisms, actual delivery, local conditions and measured outcomes visible. Development included stakeholder discussions, author application to published studies and feedback from users outside the writing group. That feedback informed revisions for clarity and feasibility; it did not demonstrate that checklist use improves reporting or learning.

The authors acknowledge heavy Global North representation and that contributors’ familiarity with competency-based education may shape the guidance. This article draws on the main paper; supplementary appendices, cited studies and alternative reporting frameworks were not independently reviewed, and no accounting-specific literature search was conducted.

No accounting application was evaluated. Clinical workplace supervision, progression decisions and patient outcomes also differ substantially from the concerns of one accounting module. The example below therefore uses selected CORE-HPE prompts as locally adaptable questions, not as an endorsed accounting checklist.

Describe the change before looking for success

“More feedback” is too vague to explain what you tried. For the hypothetical adjusting-entry workshops, a more useful description would specify what students and teachers were expected to do differently.

Perhaps students would first attempt an adjustment individually, receive feedback on their reasoning, then revise their answer and explain the correction. The intended learning change might be better discrimination between the expense for a period and the remaining prepaid asset, rather than simply greater accuracy in arithmetic.

CORE-HPE asks authors to explain how and why an initiative is expected to work, an account it calls a theory of change. For this workshop, the proposed explanation could be that identifying and correcting a reasoning error helps students recognise the same distinction in a new problem. That is an explanation to investigate, not a result already established.

Before teaching begins, a short planning note could capture the activity, intended participants, learning goal and proposed explanation. It should also describe the previous approach. Otherwise, “new feedback” might mean an additional opportunity to revise in one class, but merely a different presentation of existing feedback in another.

This description gives the evaluation a specific question: can students make the targeted accounting distinction independently after the activity?

Keep delivery evidence separate from learning evidence

The guideline distinguishes implementation indicators, such as adoption and feasibility, from educational and professional outcomes. For a module evaluation, this suggests keeping two connected records: what happened in teaching, and what students subsequently demonstrated.

The delivery record could note whether planned workshops occurred, who participated, whether students attempted the task before receiving feedback, and whether they had time to revise and explain their answers. Counting sessions alone would miss important differences between the planned activity and its enactment.

CORE-HPE calls delivery as intended implementation fidelity. It also recognises that adaptation does not automatically mean poor fidelity. If a lecturer replaces spoken explanations with written explanations because the class is larger than expected, record the change, its timing and rationale. The question is whether the revised activity preserves the intended opportunity to examine and correct reasoning, not whether every procedural detail remained unchanged.

The learning record needs a different measure. In this example, a lecturer could plan a later, unfamiliar adjusting-entry task completed without workshop support. Marking could distinguish the calculation, entry and explanation, so that a correct total does not conceal faulty reasoning. Record when the task was administered, how it was marked and how many students completed it out of those eligible.

The follow-up period should match the claim. Performance immediately after feedback addresses a different question from performance several weeks later. Neither establishes readiness for professional practice merely because students worked independently.

Let the evidence narrow the conclusion

Suppose the workshops ran as intended but later performance remained unchanged. That would not automatically prove that feedback cannot help. The proposed explanation, task, measurement or follow-up period might need investigation. If delivery was incomplete, the evaluation would instead describe a different teaching experience from the one originally planned.

Improved performance would also require restraint. In a simple before-and-after comparison, other teaching, additional practice or differences between tasks could contribute to the result. Better documentation makes these possibilities visible; it does not remove them.

Local conditions belong in the account too. Staff preparation, time available, access to sessions and unexpected workload may matter to whether the activity is feasible or worth retaining. CORE-HPE includes resource constraints, equity and unintended consequences among its reporting concerns, while acknowledging that comprehensive reporting can create burdens of its own.

A realistic starting point is a brief plan followed by a delivery log and a clearly specified learning measure. Review whether those records were useful enough to justify the effort. If preparing formal research, use reporting guidance appropriate to the study method: CORE-HPE explicitly supplements other standards and must not be used as a study-quality or risk-of-bias score.

Before your next teaching change, ask what you would need to know if the result disappointed you. Record that information from the outset. It may leave you with a narrower conclusion, but one that explains what you actually tried and what your evaluation actually observed.