Level Assessments of Learning Outcomes in Health Care and Nursing

The overall objective of the Leonardo da Vinci Transfer of Innovation project CrediCare was the transnational transfer, implementation and testing of a procedure for the description and comparative level assessment of units of learning outcomes in health care and nursing. The procedure in question is designed in a way that makes it possible to apply the tool in different VET systems and to achieve comparable results. The implementation in the course of the CrediCare project covered five European countries representing different VET traditions, namely Estonia, Finland, France, Germany and Ireland. The project activities were based on the methodology of the so-called equivalence check, whose purpose is to analyse vocational learning outcomes in terms of content and to situate them within the reference levels of the European Qualifications Framework (EQF). The instrument used for the analysis, the Module Level Indicator (MLI), estimates the level of learning outcomes by means of 51 items that are derived from the EQF descriptors. In the first phase of the project qualifications and training programmes in health care and nursing were reviewed with the help of the MLI in each of the countries. The present report includes the outcomes of this phase. Following an introductory chapter on the methodology of the MLI, the qualifications from the different partner countries are described and the results of the level assessments of learning outcomes are presented. The concluding chapter discusses the findings in a comparative perspective.