This document discusses using formative e-assessments to improve medical student learning and assessment at Leicester Medical School. Currently, students face summative exams each semester and engage in groupwork sessions to discuss workbook questions, but feedback indicates students are unsure of their progress and don't study effectively. The school piloted using the ExamSoft platform to deliver weekly formative exams covering that week's material, as well as practice exams over breaks. Students found this approach helped uncover weaknesses and encourage earlier, more active study aligned with higher-order Bloom's taxonomy skills. While it's unclear if scores directly improved, students felt it helped them learn content better. Moving forward, the school will consider costs and tools like ExamSoft

1. Exploring
Formative E-Assessment in
Leicester Medical School
Terese Bird
PedR Group 4th April 2016

2. Context
• Summative examinations in Medicine
• Every semester
• Integrated
• One Single Best Answer (SBA)
• One Short Answer Question (SAQ)
• Previous semesters’ formatives
• Document of questions distributed on Blackboard
• Face-to-face discussion

3. Groupwork sessions
• Students divided into groups
• Workbooks with questions
• Answers given the week after or never
• Searching for the answer is the point
• Facilitated by junior doctors

4. Problems
• NSS feedback scores
• Students don’t know where they are
• Tutors don’t know where students are

5. Student study issues
• Lecture notes + workbook “answers” = holy canon of notes on iPad
• Holdover from coursework
• Memorise the form of words for SAQs
• Writing notes is good but can’t write it all
• Screenshotting is enough = having it in my notes is enough = having the right
answer is enough
• “Revision” happens in the weeks before exams
• Not much day by day learning
• Not much verbalising or writing of what they know
• And if they did, how would we give feedback?

6. Laurillard’s Conversational Framework
Laurillard’s Conversational Framework (Laurillard, 2008) Dashed line box added by this author to show
segment relevant to e-assessment of this study

7. ExamSoft £30 / student / year

8. Examsoft formatives GI Unit Autumn 2015
Exam Type When Content Circumstance
Session-by-session
exams
Weekly, from Oct
through Dec 2015
Material studied in
the past week
Exam done in
groupwork class
sessions, not
under exam
conditions
Christmas 1
Christmas 2
New Year 1
New Year 2
During Christmas
break Dec ember
2015–Jan 2016
All questions from
session-by-session
exams, put
together and
randomised
Four separate
exams with the
same exam
content, offered 4
times throughout
Christmas break
for self-study
whenever students
wanted.

9. Instant answers with additional information

10. Students can log into portal to check progress

13. How did the formatives change students’
study if at all?
• “A mini-revision before the proper revision” – forced earlier study
• Uncovered trouble spots which caused them to seek solutions
• Back-and-forth communication
• Active study

14. Thinking and learning on higher levels of
Bloom’s Taxonomy
• If questions were written higher on Bloom’s, students learnt higher
on Bloom’s – constructive alignment
• Single Best Answer leads to Evaluation and Analysis
• Students reacted with Create to using exams in revision
• Created document of info on uncovered trouble spot
• Created answers when they tested themselves without the multiple-choice

15. “It’s not clear that I performed
better on summatives because
of these exams, as the
summatives are integrated, but
they helped me to learn GI
better.”
“It was a nice way of doing the
workbook questions in
groupwork”

16. What next?
• Cost of ExamSoft against other costs – Top Hat
• ExamSoft is assessment
• TopHat is interactive live learning
• Cost of time to create questions
• Consider summatives – tech and staff issues