Assessment of factual recall and higher-order cognitive domains in an open-book medical school examination

Springer Science and Business Media LLC - Tập 27 - Trang 147-165 - 2021
D. J. Davies1, P. F. McLean1, P. R. Kemp1,2, A. D. Liddle1, M. J. Morrell1,2, O. Halse1, N. M. Martin1, A. H. Sam1
1Imperial College School of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, England
2National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, London, England

Tóm tắt

Open-book examinations (OBEs) will likely become increasingly important assessment tools. We investigated how access to open-book resources affected questions testing factual recall, which might be easy to look-up, versus questions testing higher-order cognitive domains. Few studies have investigated OBEs using modern Internet resources or as summative assessments. We compared performance on an examination conducted as a traditional closed-book exam (CBE) in 2019 (N = 320) and a remote OBE with free access to Internet resources in 2020 (N = 337) due to COVID-19. This summative, end-of-year assessment focused on basic science for second-year medical students. We categorized questions by Bloom’s taxonomy (‘Remember’, versus ‘Understand/Apply’). We predicted higher performance on the OBE, driven by higher performance on ‘Remember’ questions. We used an item-centric analysis by using performance per item over all examinees as the outcome variable in logistic regression, with terms ‘Open-Book, ‘Bloom Category’ and their interaction. Performance was higher on OBE questions than CBE questions (OR 2.2, 95% CI: 2.14–2.39), and higher on ‘Remember’ than ‘Understand/Apply’ questions (OR 1.13, 95% CI: 1.09–1.19). The difference in performance between ‘Remember’ and ‘Understand/Apply’ questions was greater in the OBE than the CBE (‘Open-Book’ * ‘Bloom Category’ interaction: OR 1.2, 95% CI: 1.19–1.37). Access to open-book resources had a greater effect on performance on factual recall questions than higher-order questions, though performance was higher in the OBE overall. OBE design must consider how searching for information affects performance, particularly on questions measuring different domains of knowledge.

Tài liệu tham khảo

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