Instructor attitudes towards digital assessment in undergraduate immunology courses.

Abstract

Abstract To be better able to meet the instructional needs of undergraduate immunology instructors, we sought to understand the attitudes of individuals teaching this course. We conducted a survey, inviting 230 randomly selected instructors to participate, of which 38 completed the survey. Our results highlight that while very few instructors (2/38, 5.26%) currently use digital assessment in their immunology course, a strong majority (26/38, 72.22%) indicated that they would use it if it were available with their text. A similar number of instructors (23/38, 63.89%) expressed interest in adaptive quizzing functionality in a digital assessment platform. Additionally, we explored instructor attitudes about the goal of digital assessment. Despite a wide range of responses, over half of the survey respondents identified terminology/vocabulary (19/38, 52.78%) and reading questions that test student understanding of basic concepts (19/38, 52.78%) as important goals of a digital assessment platform. These results highlight that most instructors see digital assessment, especially in a formative setting, as an important instructional modality that can address student learning challenges.