What was the most challenging part of this course for you personally?  

Honestly? Getting started. I suspect a combination of burnout from the first half of the semester (course involving the service learning project) and a distaste for the textbook: walls of text, heading levels that weren’t used the same, and pixelated images. Once I got past the presentation of the information, I was able to do more, but still had difficulty reading it. (Edit to add: I had a pdf / ebook version of the textbook. The print version was reportedly better.)

What was the most rewarding part of this course for you personally?  

Finishing? Kidding. Mostly. Probably reading the case studies, deciding what I would do, then reading the solutions and spotting areas in which they did what I would’ve done. Of course, they also did things I hadn’t thought of, which is why I’m here. 🙂

What was the most interesting thing you learned in this course that you will take with you as you move into the IDD field?

The realization that formative and summative evaluations in IDD don’t mean the same thing in Graduate Medical Education (GME). Or at least it’s a stretch to tie the two together. In GME, evaluations done on learners throughout their training are the formative evaluations (helps inFORM what areas we need to address) and the final evaluation, which evaluates their progress over the duration of their training, is the summative (a summation of their training progress). In IDD, formative evaluation takes place during an intervention to gauge whether or not it’s accomplishing what we intended it to accomplish. I can tie that easily into GME’s formative – is our trainee progressing the way they need to be progressing? Summative, though, is more of a stretch for me. IDD: It’s done at the end of an intervention to assess the immediate impact and answer whether or not the intervention closed the gap we were trying to close. I could say that the GME summative evaluation is looking at “the immediate impact” of our training program, but the GME summative evaluation is an evaluation of the learner, not the program and that’s where my tie-ins fall apart. TL;DR (too long; didn’t read): What might mean one thing in IDD, may mean something else in another industry. It’s good for me to be aware of this potential “double-meaning” in order to avoid confusion with my future clients.