A School of Continuous Improvement paper replicates the University's induction-module audit at a regional junior-sport association's concussion-recognition training, and reports comprehension holding high across three codes.
A replication of the University's induction-module audit at grassroots football, netball and cricket clubs finds coach comprehension holding steady -- and finds the regional association unpersuaded by its own good news.
The University’s most-cited internal audit found a mandatory module’s completion certificate tracks how fast someone clicks through it, not what they took in. Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Director of the Master of Applied Measurement in the School of Continuous Improvement, led a team with Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu and Dr Anneke Tolan of the School of Emergent Priorities in testing whether the same gap appears outside a university register, applying the design to a regional junior-sport association’s mandatory concussion-recognition module for volunteer coaches.
Across 187 coaches at sixteen affiliated football, netball and cricket clubs, the team administered an unannounced comprehension check two weeks after each coach’s completion timestamp, exactly as the original audit had. Comprehension held steady and high throughout, tracking completion far more closely than the University’s own campus finding predicted, and the pattern repeated across all three codes and an announced-check control group alike.
A result this reassuring was never going to be allowed to just sit there.
— Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Director, Master of Applied Measurement
The finding reflects the School’s growing comfort with audits that don’t confirm what they set out to test. It did not have the same effect on the regional association, whose risk and insurance office has since doubled the comprehension check’s frequency and begun publishing a per-club pass-rate table. “Nobody asked us to write the compliance response into the discussion section,” said Dr Nwachukwu, “but the association had already drafted it by the time our paper was in review.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bneh8f.