An investigation of pre-clinical medical students' preference for summative or formative assessment for physiology learning
| Autor: | Mark G. Rae, Mohammed H. Abdulla |
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| Rok vydání: | 2023 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Advances in Physiology Education. |
| ISSN: | 1522-1229 1043-4046 |
| DOI: | 10.1152/advan.00013.2023 |
| Popis: | Both summative and formative assessments are known to facilitate student learning and understanding and helps them to identify areas of weakness. However, few studies have investigated students' preference for either summative or formative evaluations, particularly in the area of pre-clinical medicine. The current study addresses this deficit by surveying 137 first year graduate entry to medicine (GEM) pre-clinical medical students from two consecutive years (2018-19 & 2019-20), for their thoughts on the five summative (i.e. for a small percentage of marks), proctored, and the four informal, formative (i.e. no marks available) continuous assessments in physiology that they encountered in semesters 1 and 2, respectively. Our survey revealed that between 75-90% of students felt that both evaluation formats were roughly equally useful (i.e. selecting options, 'Agree' or 'Strongly Agree') both for providing feedback about their understanding of physiology, and for identifying deficits in their physiology knowledge. However, although a significantly larger number of students felt that summative evaluations motivated them to study more than the formative evaluations (p=0.006), overall, more students favored formative over summative assessments. Notably however, GEM students from non-biomedical backgrounds were significantly more in favor of summative assessments than those from either biomedical backgrounds (p=0.003) or the whole GEM survey cohort (p=0.01). The implications of these findings will be discussed, with suggestions as to how the student views outlined here might be facilitated within an academic program to maximise both student learning as well as their motivation to study and keep up with taught material. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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