Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine, University of Otago Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.
Higher Education Development Centre, University of Otago Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.
BMC Med Educ. 2018 Aug 22;18(1):201. doi: 10.1186/s12909-018-1312-1.
Medical students facing high-stakes exams want study resources that have a direct relationship with their assessments. At the same time, they need to develop the skills to think analytically about complex clinical problems. Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are widely used in medical education and can promote surface learning strategies, but creating MCQs requires both in-depth content knowledge and sophisticated analytical thinking. Therefore, we piloted an MCQ-writing task in which students developed MCQs for their peers to answer.
Students in a fourth-year anatomic pathology course (N = 106) were required to write MCQs using the PeerWise platform. Students created two MCQs for each of four topic areas and the MCQs were answered, rated and commented on by their classmates. Questions were rated for cognitive complexity and a paper-based survey was administered to investigate whether this activity was acceptable, feasible, and whether it promoted desirable learning behaviours in students.
Students were able to create cognitively challenging MCQs: 313/421 (74%) of the MCQs which we rated required the respondent to apply or analyse pathology knowledge. However, students who responded to the end-of-course questionnaire (N = 62) saw the task as having little educational value. Students found PeerWise easy to use, and indicated that they read widely to prepare questions and monitored the quality of their questions. They did not, however, engage in extensive peer feedback via PeerWise.
Our study showed that the MCQ writing task was feasible and engaged students in self-evaluation and synthesising information from a range of sources, but it was not well accepted and did not strongly engage students in peer-learning. Although students were able to create complex MCQs, they found some aspects of the writing process burdensome and tended not to trust the quality of each other's MCQs. Because of the evidence this task did promote deep learning, it is worth continuing this mode of teaching if the task can be made more acceptable to students.
面临高风险考试的医学生希望获得与评估直接相关的学习资源。与此同时，他们需要发展分析复杂临床问题的技能。多项选择题（MCQ）广泛应用于医学教育，可以促进表面学习策略，但创建 MCQ 需要深入的内容知识和复杂的分析思维。因此，我们试点了一项 MCQ 写作任务，让学生为同伴编写 MCQ。
一门四年级解剖病理学课程的学生（N=106）被要求使用 PeerWise 平台编写 MCQ。学生需要为四个主题领域中的每个领域编写两个 MCQ，然后由同学回答、评分和评论。问题根据认知复杂性进行评分，并进行了纸质问卷调查，以调查该活动是否被学生接受、可行，以及是否促进了学生的理想学习行为。
学生能够编写具有认知挑战性的 MCQ：我们对 421 个 MCQ 中的 313 个（74%）进行了评分，这些 MCQ 需要答题者应用或分析病理学知识。然而，完成课程结束问卷调查的学生（N=62）认为该任务教育价值不大。学生认为 PeerWise 使用方便，并表示他们广泛阅读以准备问题并监测问题的质量。然而，他们并没有通过 PeerWise 进行广泛的同伴反馈。
我们的研究表明，MCQ 写作任务是可行的，让学生参与自我评估和综合来自各种来源的信息，但它不受欢迎，也没有让学生强烈参与同伴学习。尽管学生能够编写复杂的 MCQ，但他们发现写作过程的某些方面很繁琐，并且倾向于不信任彼此的 MCQ 质量。由于这项任务确实促进了深度学习，因此如果可以使学生更容易接受，那么继续这种教学模式是值得的。
