| Abstract/Notes |
Introduction:Many academicians are currently struggling to increase learning in the classroom to improve student outcomes. In a previous pilot study titled “Role of classroom assessment in enhancing student’s learning” post-lecture quizzes, announced in advance, were shown to be a statistically superior method to two other study arms. Students frequently lose attention during class, often preferring to delay study of course content outside of the classroom and frequently immediately prior to examinations. The results of the pilot study demonstrated that simple approaches to prompting students to increase focus and attention during class was a useful, although labor intensive, pedagogical method. This method, offering frequent feedback to students on performance, has continued to be utilized and now student perceived impact is measured though the use of a brief satisfaction survey. Methods: A brief survey was constructed to evaluate student feedback on post-lecture quizzes. The questionnaire was administered at the end of the summer trimester of 2005. The survey of students’ opinion on post-lecture and weekly quizzes included the following content areas: concentration increase during lecture; facilitated memorization of course material; ease of identifying the main points of the lecture; ease of solving a problem or a case study; and overall satisfaction ratings. The data was entered into the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences for Windows, version 12.0 (SPSS Inc, Chicago, Ill), with a 10% check to ensure data entry accuracy. Simple descriptive analysis was performed. Results: All 59 students completed the brief survey. Generally, student perceptions of the post-lecture quiz procedure were very positive. The survey revealed that students believed that their concentration increased during anatomy lectures (mean response 89% on a scale of 0 to 100), that it was easier to remember material (86%), that it was easier to identify the main points of the lecture (89%), and that it was easier to solve problems or a case study (83%). Overall satisfaction with the process of taking post-lecture quizzes was 88%. Discussion: Educational research indicates that students achieve most of their learning gains outside of the classroom. The are multiple reasons for this. One reason may be simply to a lack of attention during instructional periods. The results of the present study show that students can be prompted to increase their attention without comprising self-reported satisfaction. By employing a simple classroom assessment technique, faculty prompt students to increase focus during class and provide students with important feedback on what, how much and how well they are learning. In addition to the benefits to students, faculty can use this information to refocus their teaching and provide students with feedback on the results of assessment and suggestions for improving learning. This abstract is reproduced with the permission of the publisher. |
