BACKGROUND Web-based resources are commonly used by medical students to supplement curricular material. Three commonly used resources are UpToDate (Wolters Kluwer Inc), digital textbooks, and Wikipedia; there are concerns, however, regarding Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of Wikipedia use on medical students' short-term knowled...

BACKGROUND Teaching programmes in medical education are now routinely employing active learning strategies to enhance the learning process and engage students in higher levels of learning. Team-based learning (TBL) is one active learning strategy that builds on individuals' strengths by allowing them to collaborate and work as a team to achieve a common learning objective. AIMS The present st...

Objective: To determine the effect of an audience response system (ARS) on knowledge retention of dental students and to gauge student perceptions of using the ARS. Design: Randomised control study. Setting: School of Dentistry, Cardiff University. Participants: Seventy four second-year dental students were stratified by gender and randomised anonymously to one of two groups. Methods: One group...

Introduction: In order to benefit from the advantages of essay exams, one must be sure to reliably judge students based on essay test scores. The aim of this study was to examine the correlation of scores in the essay and MCQ parts of renal pathophysiology final exam and students’ views about the effect of the type of test on their study. Methods: This descriptive correlational survey wa...

Background Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions have been classified as autogenous obsessions and reactive obsessions on the basis of the cognitive theory of Lee and Kwon. The aim of this study was to investigate the differences between autogenous groups (AG) and reactive groups (RG) in terms of metacognition and automatic thoughts, for ...

BACKGROUND The literature is sparse on written test development in a post-graduate multi-disciplinary setting. Developing and evaluating knowledge tests for use in multi-disciplinary post-graduate training is challenging. The objective of this study was to describe the process of developing and evaluating a multiple-choice question (MCQ) test for use in a multi-disciplinary training program in ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the effect of an audience response system (ARS) on knowledge retention of dental students and to gauge student perceptions of using the ARS. DESIGN Randomised control study. SETTING School of Dentistry, Cardiff University. PARTICIPANTS Seventy four second-year dental students were stratified by gender and randomised anonymously to one of two groups. METHODS One gr...

BACKGROUND Most of the academic teachers use four or five options per item of multiple choice question (MCQ) test as formative and summative assessment. Optimal number of options in MCQ item is a matter of considerable debate among academic teachers of various educational fields. There is a scarcity of the published literature regarding the optimum number of option in each item of MCQ in the fi...

INTRODUCTION This paper reports the relationship between the difficulty level and the discrimination power of true/false-type multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in a multidisciplinary paper for the para-clinical year of an undergraduate medical programme. MATERIALS AND METHODS MCQ items in papers taken from Year II Parts A, B and C examinations for Sessions 2001/02, and Part B examinations for ...

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) are a popular large-scale assessment tool. MCQs make it much easier for test-takers to take tests and for examiners to interpret their results; however, they are very expensive to compile manually, and they often need to be produced on a large scale and within short iterative cycles. We examine the problem of automated MCQ generation with the help of unsupervise...