The Gift of Formative AssessmentBy: Michelle Rogers-Johnson, Ph.D. Educational Specialist At CTL workshops, we often get questions about how to integrate higher-order formative assessment opportunities into courses with large class sizes. We recognize that class size and assessment format both play a significant role in an instructor’s ability to provide immediate feedback. In this article, I briefly describe how CTL collaborated with a faculty member to incorporate formative practice and feedback into a clinical reasoning course with a class size of 200+ students. This past year, Dr. Steven Harder, Vanessa Preast, and I created online learning exercises in Desire2Learn (D2L) to help students practice their clinical reasoning skills and prepare for the Objective Structured Clinical Exams (OSCEs) associated with the course. The exercises involve students working through a case as they answer a series of questions. The video includes screenshots from one of the online cases. Throughout the exercise, students are provided more information about the patient’s history and physical. By the end of the exercise, they develop an assessment and plan based on history, physical, and any labs/tests provided. As students go through the case, students are encouraged to compare and contrast their answers with peers. After students submit their responses in D2L, they can immediately see Dr. Harder’s answers to some of the questions, including the actual diagnosis.
Indeed, a lot of effort is involved with developing the cases and feedback, but the preliminary data indicate that students find the activities valuable (as determined by the percentage of students the activities and the qualitative feedback provided in a survey). While these cases are certainly not the ‘magic bullet’ for improving student clinical reasoning skills, it is one way to support their learning.
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May 2017
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