An anonymous approach to group based assessment

Last year, a revolutionary new idea was presented at the CAA conference introducing VorteX, a collaboration tool that allows fairer grading of group based assessments through its monitoring of group work, and the presentation of statistical information. Since that time, further research has been carried out at Aberystwyth to improve the effectiveness of group-based assessments, and to ultimately improve students results and learning. Although VorteX has helped students collaborate and work as a team, it has become apparent that there are still several issues when working in a group. As soon as students are monitored, it appears that many of the standard issues of team-working are overcome, in particular the problem of students not putting in their fair share of the effort. What is difficult to overcome is the clash of personalities and biased preconceptions

Improving results with positive directed feedback in summative assessments

Formative assessments are fast becoming the most commonly used approach to computer aided assessments. Much better at giving feedback, students are able to take a formative test after studying new material, test their knowledge, review their answers and find out exactly where they are going wrong. Unfortunately despite being a strong approach for improving student learning, formative assessments do have several problems: - • The integrity of the questions is lost once students have had access to the answers. This means they cannot be re-used without the risk of students remembering the answer rather than the reason for the answers. • Observations have shown that some students do not try as hard when working with formative assessments as they are “not as serious” as summative exams. This kind of attitude is synonymous with answers in the back of textbooks, where students copy the answers to get the questions correct, rather than using the answers as a means of self-certification. • Students do not necessarily receive the feedback that they need. Without detailed feedback for all incorrect answers, it is difficult for a student to understand the full reason why their answers were incorrect. • Lecturers do not get the feedback that they require from the students. Without ‘more accurate’ summative results, lecturers are often not convinced as to how well the students are learning the materials. They will often dismiss poor results as being caused by the students not taking them serious enoug

Effect of preoperative delay on prognosis for patients with early stage non-small cell lung cancer

AbstractObjective: Screening for lung cancer will discover many nodules of indeterminate pathology. Observation has the theoretic risk of permitting dissemination of a localized cancer and worsening prognosis, whereas immediate evaluation of benign conditions generates morbidity and cost. This study was conducted to assess the effect of delay in surgical intervention on survival for patients with early stage non-small cell lung cancer. Methods: Records for patients with resected pathologic stage I and II non-small cell lung cancer (1989-1999) were abstracted for patient age, race, sex, medical history, date of presentation, date and type of surgical treatment, pathologic stage, and date of death or last follow-up. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis was performed to test for the effect of delay (time from presentation to surgical intervention) on survival. Results: Eighty-four patients were identified. Median age was 66 years, median preoperative interval was 82 days (range, 1-641 days), and median follow-up was 3.3 years (range, 5 days-11.9 years). Median survival was 3.7 years. Overall 5-year survival was 40%; disease-specific 5-year survival was 63%. Log-rank analysis of the effect of delay on overall survival generated a P value of.54, with an estimated hazard ratio for a 90-day delay of 1.06 (95% confidence interval, 0.87-1.30). Conclusions: For this population, we were unable to detect a significant effect of delay on prognosis. Although these results suggest that the risk of judicious observation of indeterminate pulmonary nodules might be low, the 95% confidence interval is broad. Larger sample sizes are needed to reach definitive conclusions.J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 2003;125:108-1