INTRODUCTION Medical students at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, Switzerland, have the opportunity to practice clinical skills with simulated patients during formative sessions in preparation for clerkships. These sessions are given in two formats: 1) direct observation of an encounter followed by verbal feedback (direct feedback) and 2) subsequent review of the videotaped encoun...

BACKGROUND Online formative assessment continues to be an important area of research and methods which actively engage the learner and provide useful learning outcomes are of particular interest. This study reports on the outcomes of a two year study of medical students using formative assessment tools. METHOD The study was conducted over two consecutive years using two different strategies f...

Many approaches have been proposed for providing feedback in academic writing, however, few of them are visually based. We describe a novel visualisation method for providing feedback to support formative essay assessment. The visualisation method makes use of text mining techniques to provide insight on the semantics of the topics in an essay. We propose that visualisation can be used to mitig...

Specialised and high priced simulators for surgical training, chemical labs, and flight training can provide real-world simulation in a safe and risk-free environment, but they are not accessible for the broader community due to costs for technology and availability of experts. Thus, training scenarios shifted to virtual worlds providing access for everyone interested in acquiring skills and kn...

It is now an established fact that the learning cycle greatly enhanced by timely and effective feedback. Formative assessment has become indispensable vehicle to facilitate student engagement in feedback process, even if they do not recognise are receiving This paper, based on winning entry Institution of Structural Engineers Excellence Engineering Education Award 2020, presents a review some f...

A positive correlation between performance and participation in formative quizzes and final summative examinations has been reported many times. The goal of the present interview study was to construct a model to explain why students may elect not to engage with formative assessment opportunities. Our medical school's preclinical curriculum has an established policy of offering weekly online qu...

Background: Student ratings have dominated as the primary and, frequently, only measure of teaching performance at colleges and universities for the past 50 years. Recently, there has been a trend toward augmenting those ratings with other data sources to broaden and deepen the evidence base. The 360 multisource feedback (MSF) model used in management and industry for half a century and in clin...

Qualitative evaluations of courses prove difficult due to low response rates. Online courses may permit the analysis of qualitative feedback provided by health care providers (HCPs) during and after the course is completed. This study describes the use of qualitative methods for an online continuing medical education (CME) course through the analysis of HCP feedback for the purpose of quality i...

Many computing education studies have reported poor learning outcomes in programming courses for novices. Yet methods for measuring students’ ability to generate computer programs remains an open research problem. In this paper we review some limitations of existing approaches for assessing student programs. We then propose a set of valid and reliable metrics for the direct measurement of novic...