In 1995 and 1996, 9% of registrars in the West of Scotland failed to demonstrate minimum competence in their audit project for summative assessment. Adverse trainer advice was implicated. This study set out to assess trainers' and registrars' confidence with audit teaching, the methods of teaching audit, and the perceived needs of both groups.

Summative evaluation is often associated with more objective, quantitative methods of data collection. Summative evaluation is linked to the evaluation drivers of accountability. It is recommended to use a balance of both quantitative and qualitative methods in order to get a better understanding of what your project has achieved, and how or why this has occurred. Using qualitative methods of d...

BACKGROUND Evaluating clinician compliance with recommended steps in clinical guidelines provides one measure of quality of process of care but can result in a multiplicity of indicators across illnesses, making it problematic to produce any summative picture of process quality, information that may be most useful to policy-makers and managers. OBJECTIVE We set out to develop a clinically log...

BACKGROUND In competency-based medical education emphasis has shifted towards outcomes, capabilities, and learner-centeredness. Together with a focus on sustained evidence of professional competence this calls for new methods of teaching and assessment. Recently, medical educators advocated the use of a holistic, programmatic approach towards assessment. Besides maximum facilitation of learning...

Objective: We present findings from the initial phase of our collaborative design process to build handheld, formative assessment tools for teachers. Specifically we report on 1) a survey of the variety of teacher-level data collection processes in the school, and 2) the early tool-prototyping process. Background: Prior work demonstrated the important role played by formative feedback systems. ...

A cluster analysis data classification technique was used on assessment scores from 157 undergraduate nursing students who passed 2 successive compulsory courses in human anatomy and physiology. Student scores in five summative assessment tasks, taken in each of the courses, were used as inputs for a cluster analysis procedure. We aimed to group students into high-achieving (HA) and low-achievi...

This paper describes the development of a variety of computer-based assessment opportunities, both formative and summative, that are available to a large first year biology class at The University of Sydney. These materials include: weekly quizzes; a mock exam; quiz sections in tutorials; and special self-assessment modules (SAMs). The weekly quiz is password protected and secure but the remain...

OBJECTIVE To determine the effect of transition of summative assessment from frequent modular to combined block assessment and its role on learning of medical students. METHODS A descriptive study was carried out at Islamic International Medical College. A questionnaire comprizing of 8 questions with Likert scale (1-5) was designed for 3(rd) year students. The questions were grouped in three ...