Chur-Hansen A
Department of Psychiatry at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, University of Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia.
Med Educ. 2000 Mar;34(3):194-8. doi: 10.1046/j.1365-2923.2000.00457.x.
An exercise is described which aimed to make clear to first-year undergraduate medical students the expected writing skills required for an essay examination in one discipline.
Many students were from a non-English speaking background and over one-third of students, regardless of language background, had limited experience in this type of essay writing.
For this exercise, a practice essay was written by each student for formative assessment. The essay was rated by a tutor and by the student according to well-defined criteria. This allowed for comparisons to be made in a structured and objective way between the judgements of the student and the assessor.
Students found the exercise to be very useful, although whether essay writing skills actually improved could not be established. Students from non-English speaking backgrounds tended to be most harsh in their self-evaluations, yet tutor-evaluations generally showed these students to have better writing skills than other students. Indeed, correlations between self- and tutor-evaluations were quite low.
It is evident that students and their educators may be unclear about each others' expectations. By making explicit the requirements of an exercise, misunderstandings may be minimized and it is possible that student performance could improve, though further research is required to verify these hypotheses. It is suggested that students should be encouraged to evaluate their own work and should be instructed in writing skills throughout their medical degree education.
描述了一项练习，旨在让本科一年级医学生清楚了解某一学科论文考试所需的写作技能。
许多学生来自非英语背景，超过三分之一的学生，无论语言背景如何，在这类论文写作方面经验有限。
在这项练习中，每个学生撰写一篇练习论文用于形成性评估。论文由一名导师和学生根据明确的标准进行评分。这使得能够以结构化和客观的方式对学生和评估者的判断进行比较。
学生们发现这项练习非常有用，尽管论文写作技能是否真的提高尚无法确定。来自非英语背景的学生在自我评价中往往最为严苛，但导师评价通常显示这些学生的写作技能比其他学生更好。事实上，自我评估与导师评估之间的相关性相当低。
显然，学生及其教育者可能不清楚彼此的期望。通过明确练习的要求，可以将误解最小化，学生的表现有可能得到提高，不过需要进一步研究来验证这些假设。建议鼓励学生评估自己的作品，并在整个医学学位教育过程中教授他们写作技能。
