Essay Exams: Beyond Knowledge and Recall of Factual Information
Presenters: Amy Wilson-Delfosse and Klara Papp
March 24, 12 PM ET
A firmly held belief in medical education is that assessment drives learning. Students generally learn what they need to learn to succeed on required assessments. As part of our curriculum redesign a decade ago at Case Western Reserve University SOM, we switched from almost exclusively multiple-choice to open-ended essay type questions. The switch occurred after vigorous debate. The leadership believed that constructed response-type questions promoted more desirable study methods and required conceptual organization and synthesis of information on the students’ part more so than multiple choice. This shift was supported by our faculty. During this webinar, we will review our experience with open-ended assessments as well as the lessons learned using open-ended essay type questions for the assignment of student grades during Foundations of Medicine and Health. We will share a sampling of our faculty’s comments and insights regarding the assessment of student performance using open-ended essay type questions. We will explore evidence behind the commonly held view that open-ended items require that students both search for and retrieve information whereas multiple choice test items require only that students recognize and pick the correct answer out from among a list of incorrect choices (ironically enough, called distractors), i.e., that different assessment formats place different cognitive demands on students.
For more information or to register for the Spring Audio Seminar Series, click here.
and Prof. Aviad Haramati, Georgetown University. The ESME course requires a separate registration and is held on a full day prior to the IAMSE conference, continues with special discussion sessions during the conference, and concludes with a full afternoon on the final conference day.
participants are eligible to enroll in the IAMSE Fellowship program.
Testing Your Test: Assessing the Quality of Test Items
Planning for Curriculum Mapping
I am very excited about IAMSE selecting Leiden to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the IAMSE Annual Meeting. The city of Leiden hosts the country’s oldest university (founded in 1575) and almost from the very beginning a Medical School has been in place. So it should not surprise you that Leiden has a very long tradition and excellent record in the field of medical science education. Throughout the city you still find impressive milestones from that legacy. Nowadays, Leiden University Medical Center is a modern high quality healthcare facility delivering patient care, biomedical research, and education in the health care professions across the entire continuum. Leiden Medical School is eager to share their experiences and knowledge in this field with the meeting participants. Therefore please do plan to join us in The Netherlands this June to meet your fellow educators from around the world and to enjoy the wonderful country and its welcoming people.
Instructional Design – Learning Objectives; Backwards Design, Blooms Taxonomy
This year’s annual meeting has a focus on learning assessment. We will be led in our discussions and deliberations throughout the event with internationally-renowned plenary speakers such as Drs. Cees van der Vleuten, Olle ten Cate, Geoff Norman, and other innovation leaders. The language of assessment takes on a world of terminology and best-practice trendings that enliven our daily academic conversations and research (rubrics, evaluation, generational learning needs, formative/summative, feedback, learning portfolios, entrustable professional activities, competency, judgement, peer-assessment, self-reflection, objective/subjective, TBL, PBL, resilience, etc.) and will prove to be the basis for our meeting’s posters, oral sessions and workshops. Our beautiful venue in Leiden could not be more inviting and conducive to our gathering and to our individual and group exploration of the quaint and historical Dutch surroundings. Please do plan to join us in The Netherlands this June 2016; there will be much to experience both professionally and culturally so bring yourself, your colleagues, and your families!