Olson Byron L, McDonald James L
Department of Oral Biology, Indiana University School of Dentistry, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA.
J Dent Educ. 2004 Jun;68(6):656-9.
Research suggests that high-quality formative assessment has a strongly positive effect upon student learning. Unfortunately, formative assessment does not appear to be frequently used in didactic dental curricula. Our hypothesis was that providing students with practice online exam questions would enable those who voluntarily took the exam to perform better on subsequent summative exams than did students who did not utilize this opportunity. A test bank of exam questions was written for dental students enrolled in two different biomedical science courses. Half the questions were arbitrarily assigned to an electronic test site; the other half were used as a written summative classroom exam taken later. Students who took the online formative exam in the first semester course scored 8.8 percent higher on the summative exam than did those who did not take the practice exam. This represents almost a full letter grade higher for the formative exam-takers. Students who took the formative online exam in the second semester course scored 5.2 percent higher on the summative exam than did the non-takers. Both of these differences were statistically significant. Under these experimental circumstances, providing formative online exams appeared to promote student performance as reflected by higher scores on the summative exams.
研究表明，高质量的形成性评估对学生学习有强烈的积极影响。不幸的是，形成性评估似乎并未在牙科理论课程中频繁使用。我们的假设是，为学生提供在线考试练习题，将使那些自愿参加考试的学生在随后的终结性考试中比未利用此机会的学生表现更好。为修读两门不同生物医学科学课程的牙科学生编写了一个试题库。一半的题目被随机分配到一个电子测试平台；另一半则用作稍后进行的书面终结性课堂考试。在第一学期课程中参加在线形成性考试的学生在终结性考试中的得分比未参加练习考试的学生高8.8%。这意味着参加形成性考试的学生的成绩几乎整整高了一个字母等级。在第二学期课程中参加在线形成性考试的学生在终结性考试中的得分比未参加者高5.2%。这两个差异均具有统计学意义。在这些实验条件下，提供在线形成性考试似乎促进了学生的表现，这体现在终结性考试中更高的分数上。
