Assessing a traditional case-based application exercise and a student question creation exercise on student performance and perceptions

Answering questions in a co-created formative exam question bank improves summative exam performance, while students perceive benefits from answering, authoring, and peer discussion: A mixed methods analysis of PeerWise

Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are a common form of assessment in medical schools and students seek opportunities to engage with formative assessment that reflects their summative exams. Formative assessment with feedback and active learning strategies improve student learning outcomes, but a challenge for educators, particularly those with large class sizes, is how to provide students with such opportunities without overburdening faculty. To address this, we enrolled medical students in the online learning platform PeerWise, which enables students to author and answer MCQs, rate the quality of other students' contributions as well as discuss content. A quasi-experimental mixed methods research design was used to explore PeerWise use and its impact on the learning experience and exam results of fourth year medical students who were studying courses in clinical sciences and pharmacology. Most students chose to engage with PeerWise following its introduction as a noncompulsory learning opportunity. While students perceived benefits in authoring and peer discussion, students engaged most highly with answering questions, noting that this helped them identify gaps in knowledge, test their learning and improve exam technique. Detailed analysis of the 2015 cohort (n = 444) with hierarchical regression models revealed a significant positive predictive relationship between answering PeerWise questions and exam results, even after controlling for previous academic performance, which was further confirmed with a follow-up multi-year analysis (2015-2018, n = 1693). These 4 years of quantitative data corroborated students' belief in the benefit of answering peer-authored questions for learning.

An Active Learning Activity to Reinforce the Design Components of the Corticosteroids

Despite the popularity of active learning applications over the past few decades, few activities have been reported for the field of medicinal chemistry. The purpose of this study is to report a new active learning activity, describe participant contributions, and examine participant performance on the assessment questions mapped to the objective covered by the activity. In this particular activity, students are asked to design two novel corticosteroids as a group (6-8 students per group) based on the design characteristics of marketed corticosteroids covered in lecture coupled with their pharmaceutics knowledge from the previous semester and then defend their design to the class through an interactive presentation model. Although class performance on the objective mapped to this material on the assessment did not reach statistical significance, use of this activity has allowed fruitful discussion of misunderstood concepts and facilitated multiple changes to the lecture presentation. As pharmacy schools continue to emphasize alternative learning pedagogies, publication of previously implemented activities demonstrating their use will help others apply similar methodologies.