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Abstract Category: Methods

Poster ID: M19

DEVELOPMENT OF A SELF-ASSESSMENT WEBSITE AS AN AID TO TEACHING BASIC SCIENCE

Alan J. Biel, Ph.D.*, Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, Ross University School of Medicine, Portsmouth , Dominica .

      In preparing for exams, medical students often have trouble determining when they have mastered the material.  Study often consists of reading their notes multiple times until they have the notes memorized.  Unfortunately, students often don’t know whether they have actually learned and understood the material until the exam results are in.  A second problem is that the lecture format does not provide students with the opportunity to analyze the material presented and develop relationships between the concepts.  Often the exam is the first time the students become aware that while they know the facts, they are unable to use those facts to solve complex problems.  While providing sample questions can help with these problems, the way in which practice questions are used by students often limits their value.  Commonly, students will use sample questions to direct their study instead of studying and then using the questions to assess their grasp of the material.

     This presentation will describe the construction of a website designed to help students assess their grasp of the subject matter and to synthesize this new material into the larger body of knowledge.  The first sections of the website contain questions which assess the students’ grasp of the factual material.  The questions are tied to the lecture manual so that each section of the website corresponds with one to three pages of lecture notes.  In order to avoid having the students use the questions as a study guide, the students are given only 90 seconds to answer the question, and answers to the questions are not provided.  Only if a student answers at least 75% of the questions in a section correctly can the student can move on to the next section.  Otherwise, suggestions for further study are given and the student has a second chance at similar questions covering the same material.  An important aspect of this website is that the students are sent back to the lecture manual to learn the associated concept or body of facts, instead of being provided with the answer to the question or an explanation specific to the question.  Later sections of the website contain more complex questions that assess the student’s ability to synthesize the material.  These sections include two-step questions and questions based on clinical vignettes.  The website also contains a section which helps the students work their way through a question.  In this section, a series of questions leads the student through the process of answering a complex multiple choice question.  During this process, a concept map is built which depicts the relationships between the facts and concepts necessary to answer the question.

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