Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice
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Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract · Jan 2005
The effects of violating standard item writing principles on tests and students: the consequences of using flawed test items on achievement examinations in medical education.
The purpose of this research was to study the effects of violations of standard multiple-choice item writing principles on test characteristics, student scores, and pass-fail outcomes. Four basic science examinations, administered to year-one and year-two medical students, were randomly selected for study. Test items were classified as either standard or flawed by three independent raters, blinded to all item performance data. ⋯ Item flaws had little effect on test score reliability or other psychometric quality indices. Results showed that flawed multiple-choice test items, which violate well established and evidence-based principles of effective item writing, disadvantage some medical students. Item flaws introduce the systematic error of construct-irrelevant variance to assessments, thereby reducing the validity evidence for examinations and penalizing some examinees.
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Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract · Jan 2005
Comparative StudyDoes instructor evaluation by students using a WEB-based questionnaire impact instructor performance?
Student feedback is a valuable method to evaluate the quality of education. Using a WEB-based questionnaire, the objective of this study was to evaluate the factors that may affect the ratings given by the students and the impact of those ratings on the instructor's teaching performance. ⋯ No significant improvement was found in the mean points of the total group. In the second year, only 16.4 of the instructors were affected positively.