Team Objective Structured Bedside Assessment (TOSBA) as formative assessment in undergraduate Obstetrics and Gynaecology: a cohort study.

BACKGROUND: Team Objective Structured Bedside Assessment (TOSBA) is a learning approach in which a team of medical students undertake a set of structured clinical tasks with real patients in order to reach a diagnosis and formulate a management plan and receive immediate feedback on their performance from a facilitator. TOSBA was introduced as formative assessment to an 8-week undergraduate teaching programme in Obstetrics and Gynaecology (O\u26G) in 2013/14. Each student completed 5 TOSBA sessions during the rotation. The aim of the study was to evaluate TOSBA as a teaching method to provide formative assessment for medical students during their clinical rotation. The research questions were: Does TOSBA improve clinical, communication and/or reasoning skills? Does TOSBA provide quality feedback? METHODS: A prospective cohort study was conducted over a full academic year (2013/14). The study used 2 methods to evaluate TOSBA as a teaching method to provide formative assessment: (1) an online survey of TOSBA at the end of the rotation and (2) a comparison of the student performance in TOSBA with their performance in the final summative examination. RESULTS: During the 2013/14 academic year, 157 students completed the O\u26G programme and the final summative examination . Each student completed the required 5 TOSBA tasks. The response rate to the student survey was 68 % (n = 107/157). Students reported that TOSBA was a beneficial learning experience with a positive impact on clinical, communication and reasoning skills. Students rated the quality of feedback provided by TOSBA as high. Students identified the observation of the performance and feedback of other students within their TOSBA team as key features. High achieving students performed well in both TOSBA and summative assessments. The majority of students who performed poorly in TOSBA subsequently passed the summative assessments (n = 20/21, 95 %). Conversely, the majority of students who failed the summative assessments had satisfactory scores in TOSBA (n = 6/7, 86 %). CONCLUSIONS: TOSBA has a positive impact on the clinical, communication and reasoning skills of medical students through the provision of high-quality feedback. The use of structured pre-defined tasks, the observation of the performance and feedback of other students and the use of real patients are key elements of TOSBA. Avoiding student complacency and providing accurate feedback from TOSBA are on-going challenges

The mechanism of impact of summative assessment on medical students’ learning

It has become axiomatic that assessment impacts powerfully on student learning, but there is a surprising dearth of research on how. This study explored the mechanism of impact of summative assessment on the process of learning of theory in higher education. Individual, in-depth interviews were conducted with medical students and analyzed qualitatively. The impact of assessment on learning was mediated through various determinants of action. Respondents’ learning behaviour was influenced by: appraising the impact of assessment; appraising their learning response; their perceptions of agency; and contextual factors. This study adds to scant extant evidence and proposes a mechanism to explain this impact. It should help enhance the use of assessment as a tool to augment learning

Participants perceptions of fair and valid assessment in tertiary music education

This chapter reports on the views of a selection of Bachelor of Music students and their teachers at the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University (QCGU), providing important insights into how current assessment practices influence student learning in the Australian context, and with particular reference to the Threshold Learning Outcomes for the Creative and Performing Arts. Themes addressed include the role of teacher feedback, experience with self- and peer assessment, the role of exemplars in standards-based assessment, balancing holistic and criteria-based assessment practices, subjectivity in assessing conceptualization in creative works, and the role of tacit knowledge in students fully understanding and applying assessment criteria. Results of focus group sessions with students in the Performance, Musical Theatre and Composition streams of the Bachelor of Music degree, reveal that participants are enthusiastic about ensuring that assessment practices and teacher feedback enhances their growth as musicians, ultimately enabling them to become self-regulated learners. Their teachers are equally concerned about providing their students with high professional standards as reference points for their musical growth, and ensuring that summative assessments of musical performances are fair and valid

Evaluating machine learning approaches to classify pharmacy students’ reflective statements

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. Reflective writing is widely acknowledged to be one of the most effective learning activities for promoting students’ self-reflection and critical thinking. However, manually assessing and giving feedback on reflective writing is time consuming, and known to be challenging for educators. There is little work investigating the potential of automated analysis of reflective writing, and even less on machine learning approaches which offer potential advantages over rule-based approaches. This study reports progress in developing a machine learning approach for the binary classification of pharmacy students’ reflective statements about their work placements. Four common statistical classifiers were trained on a corpus of 301 statements, using emotional, cognitive and linguistic features from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analysis, in combination with affective and rhetorical features from the Academic Writing Analytics (AWA) platform. The results showed that the Random-forest algorithm performed well (F-score = 0.799) and that AWA features, such as emotional and reflective rhetorical moves, improved performance

Quality assurance through assessment

This entry focuses on quality assurance as evident in assessment practices in teacher education. In teacher education, like other higher degree learning, assessment may be regarded as a visible output that can inform teacher educators of the quality of the pre-service teachers’ learning, as well as provide information about the effectiveness of the related course. In teacher education courses considerations about assessment quality have an additional importance. Pre-service teachers are learning to be assessors, to teach their own students to understand how assessment can inform their learning, and engage in quality assurance activities around assessment