Leadership Development Among a Cohort of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Students in the Health Professions

Leadership content and pedagogical strategies are fundamental to health professionals’ education. All health professionals must be able to lead effectively and thrive in today’s complex health systems. Students must be involved in meaningful didactic and experiential leadership development early in their academic progression, and educators are positioned to lead in this initiative. This paper describes pre-post findings from an application of Kouzes and Posner’s Student Leadership Practices Inventory with students who completed an interdisciplinary undergraduate leadership development program and observers’ perspectives of these students’ leadership characteristics. Outcome data found positive change in pre-post data except for encourage the heart for the student participants and challenges others for the observers. Critical reflection and authentic assessment of actions that occurred during the leadership program could have shifted students’ realization of behaviors they actually did not demonstrate as originally thought at the beginning of the program. Observers’ scores tended to be higher than students’ scores; however, minimal change in posttest scores could be attributed to not using the same observers for the pre and post assessments.