Research in Clinical Assessment grant

To support medical assessment research, the MCC offers research grants to interested faculty members, staff members or graduate students of Canadian medical faculties.

2024-2025 - Sally Binks

Testing that makes you think: Using basic science testing to amplify the effects of integrated clinical instruction

Investigators

Sally Binks, MSc, PhD(c)

Co-investigators

K. Kulasegaram

R. Brydges

N. Woods

Abstract

Introduction:

An important goal of medical education is to integrate the basic science concepts learned in the pre-clinical years with the clinical knowledge learners will gain in the latter portion of their undergraduate education and beyond. Learners who use their basic science knowledge to support their understanding of clinical concepts show superior performance on diagnostic and clinical reasoning tests. Instruction can be designed to promote this integration of basic science and clinical knowledge within learners’ minds. Another powerful strategy to support retention and transfer of learning is formative testing. There is reason to believe that tests can be designed to promote a particular kind of cognitive processing—distinctive processing—that optimally primes the learner’s mind to understand, remember and apply new, related information. With the proposed work, we will investigate whether testing basic science knowledge to promote distinctive processing has an amplificative effect on integrated instruction.

Methods:

In this 2×2 experiment, we compare the effects of test type and test schedule. We developed two versions of a basic science multiple-choice question (MCQ) test; one version was designed to have response options that are very similar along several dimensions (the competitive version-C); the other version was designed to have less similar response options (the noncompetitive version-NC). Participants will complete one version of the test either before (Pre-I) or after receiving integrated instruction (Post-I) on a related clinical therapy. Thus, there will be four conditions in the experiment (C/Pre-I, C/Post-I, NC/Pre-I, and NC/ Post-I). Seven days post-instruction, participants will complete an MCQ test of conceptual knowledge and a transfer test related to the exemplar clinical therapy.

Outcomes:

We expect the following pattern of results: Mean scores on both tests will be highest for the C/Pre-I condition, followed by C/Post-I, NC/Pre-I and the lowest scores for the NC/Post-I condition.