Using Precourse Formative Written Testing in a Pharmacology Class Greatly Increases Medical Students’ Performance in Final Written Summative Tests

Joachim Neumann,Stephanie Simmrodt,Ulrich Gergs

doi:10.1155/2020/6273806

Joachim Neumann, Stephanie Simmrodt + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/6273806

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Abstract

We wanted to test the progress of medical students at our university in a pharmacology course. The formal teaching was given as lectures to the full class of students. We gave the very same written test of multiple-choice (MC) questions (single best choice) to third-year medical students before and after a one semester course of basic pharmacology. The initial voluntary test (containing 30 MC questions) was taken by 79% of the eligible students (n = 147), a week before pharmacology lectures had started. Defining a passing grade of 60% of right answers, only 2% of the students passed the test. The range was between 5 and 21 points. The final, now obligatory, written test at the end of the course (one week after the last lecture in pharmacology) was taken by all students in the semester (n = 179) and was passed by 95%, of students, again defined by the same passing score. Here, the points obtained ranged from 12 to 29. Over the time of the semester, the attendance in the lectures dropped dramatically to less than 10% of the students. Hence, progress tests are useful, but they hardly measure the gain in knowledge through attendance in the pharmacology lecture (the intervention); they also measure other sources of knowledge, such as textbook reading or memorizing only the initial questions and looking up the answers.

Highlights

Assessing a gain in knowledge in education is a continuous task [1]. One such possibility lies in using various forms of progress tests. is has been done in various ways in medical education in numerous medical schools and different countries worldwide
Only one MC test is given at the end of a semester for teaching a certain subject, for instance, after the student, if they chose so, could have attended a lecture in basic pharmacology
In the voluntary pretest (Figure 3), in the subsequent group of new students, 147 of 184 possible students participated (80% of students in this cohort). e mean points reached amounted to 11.5 ± 0.23, of which 65 were male and 82 were female, who again reached similar points, namely, 11.9 ± 0.38 and 11.1 ± 0.28 points (p > 0.05)

Summary

Introduction

Assessing a gain in knowledge in education is a continuous task [1]. One such possibility lies in using various forms of progress tests. is has been done in various ways in medical education in numerous medical schools and different countries worldwide. Assessing a gain in knowledge in education is a continuous task [1] One such possibility lies in using various forms of progress tests. E advantages of MC tests compared to oral examinations are that they can be made highly reliable and objective, and they can be standardized to test large classes in a short time and test a broad knowledge. They are cost-effective because a computer can grade and evaluate the tests, providing information such as difficulty indices, discrimination indices, reliabilities, strength of distractors, test discrimination, and other psychometrical parameters [2, 3]. We hypothesized that increase of knowledge was solely due to the lecture during the semester

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