"OPEN BOOK" OPEN WEB EXAMINATION
233387222
Evolution of a Qualifying Examination from a Timed Closed Book Format to an Open Book Collaborative Take Home Format: A Case Study and Commentary
Objective: Our master's program in biostatistics requires a qualifying examination (QE) A curriculum review led us to question whether to replace a closed book format with an open book one. Our goal was to improve the QE. Methods: This is a case study and commentary, where we describe the evolution of the QE, both in its goals and its content. The result was a week long, open book, collaborative, take home examination structured around the analysis of two types of studies commonly encountered in biostatistical practice. Our evaluation of the revised format includes its fairness, student performance, and student feedback. Results: The new format has a number of advantages: (1) it has a specific educational goal; (2) it provides sufficient time for students to produce their best work; (3) it encourages students to review elements of the first year curriculum as needed; and (4) it can be administered remotely, even during a pandemic. Potential concerns pertaining to cheating and rigor can be adequately addressed. The results of our evaluation of the examination have been encouraging. The QE is intended to be a "fair" examination that covers important material which is beneficial to students, and does so in a way that is transparent and puts everyone in a position to perform their best work. Conclusions: An examination using this format has much to recommend it. When designing an examination, it is important to (a) match its format with clearly specified educational goals; and (b) distinguish between the distinct constructs of difficulty and rigor.
Gregory P Samsa
224924774
Effect of Changing From Closed Book to Formulary Allowed Examinations
Objective. To determine whether allowing final year Bachelor of Pharmacy students to use a medicines formulary during examinations modified their learning behaviors and performance, and to investigate students' perceptions about having this resource available during examinations. Methods. Student performance and examination difficulty (as measured by classification of examination questions as high or low according to Bloom's taxonomy of learning) in second semester examinations (formulary allowed) was compared with first semester examinations (closed book) in successive years. Students completed a survey regarding their study and examination approaches and experiences after both semesters. Results. Examinations in semester two had more questions rated higher on Bloom's taxonomy than did examinations in semester one. Data were collected from student surveys for closed book examinations (response rate of 25% and 19% in 2015 and 2016, respectively) and open book examinations (response rate of 22% and 15% in 2015 and 2016, respectively) Students' study approaches, hours studied per week, and anxiety (all self reported) did not differ between semesters one and two, but students in semester two spent more time studying with a formulary compared with students in semester one. Qualitative analysis of student comments revealed students preferred the formulary allowed examinations over the closed book examinations. The majority of students (68% agreed with the statement: "Knowing that I will have access to the AMH [Australian Medicines Handbook] during the exams allowed me to pay more attention to higher level skills such as analysis and evaluation." Conclusion. When students were allowed to use a formulary for examinations, they studied more using their formulary prior to the examination. Students performed similarly on examinations with a greater proportion of questions addressing higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy and on closed book examinations that were comparatively less cognitively challenging.
American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education
Daniel Thomas Malone Sara Chuang Elizabeth Yuriev Jennifer L Short
233846978
Moving Assessment Online: Experiences within a School of Pharmacy
The COVID 19 pandemic required academic institutions to quickly transition to online learning and make changes to assessment procedures. This study examines how a school of pharmacy creatively approached the challenge of online assessment while maintaining the standards necessary to prepare practice ready student pharmacists. To conduct traditional exams, instructors deployed two different types of methods utilizing testing software: a video conferencing technology approach which mimicked pre pandemic, on campus proctored exams; or open book, internet access enabled exams that ensured academic integrity and rigor through various testing strategies. To assess students' clinical skills, faculty used a combination of techniques such as physical examinations, patient interviews, and patient presentations. To understand the student experience with these assessments, students were surveyed using a 12 item questionnaire. Overall, online video proctoring maintained consistency in exam structure and administration, but required extensive instruction for both students and proctors. Students preferred unproctored, open book, internet access enabled, standard time exams versus proctored, closed book, internet access disabled, extended time exams. Changes to testing procedures, whether with proctored or unproctored methods, appeared to increase student stress.
Kelsey Woods Morgan Erin N Adams Teresa Elsobky Marcia L Brackbill Amber Y Darr
235624320
OKGIT: Open Knowledge Graph Link Prediction with Implicit Types
Open Knowledge Graphs (OpenKG) refer to a set of (head noun phrase, relation phrase, tail noun phrase) triples such as (tesla, return to, new york) extracted from a corpus using OpenIE tools. While OpenKGs are easy to bootstrap for a domain, they are very sparse and far from being directly usable in an end task. Therefore, the task of predicting new facts, i.e. link prediction, becomes an important step while using these graphs in downstream tasks such as text comprehension, question answering, and web search query recommendation. Learning embeddings for OpenKGs is one approach for link prediction that has received some attention lately. However, on careful examination, we found that current OpenKG link prediction algorithms often predict noun phrases (NPs) with incompatible types for given noun and relation phrases. We address this problem in this work and propose OKGIT that improves OpenKG link prediction using novel type compatibility score and type regularization. With extensive experiments on multiple datasets, we show that the proposed method achieves state of the art performance while producing type compatible NPs in the link prediction task.
FINDINGS
Partha P Talukdar
233856856
THE EFFECT OF THE NUMBER OF DISTRACTORS AND THE "NONE OF THE ABOVE" "ALL OF THE ABOVE" OPTIONS IN MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS
Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are commonly used for assessment in higher education. With increased use of on line examination it is likely that the usage of MCQs will be even more in years to come. It is therefore of interest to examine some characteristics of these type of questions such as the effect of the number of distractors used and the "None of the above" (NOTA) or "All of the above" (AOTA) options. The tutor web is an open source, on line drilling system that is freely available to anyone having access to the Internet. The system was designed to be used for teaching mathematics and statistics but can in principle be used for other subjects as well. The system offers thousands of multiple choice questions at high school and university level. In addition to be a tool used by students for learning it has also been used as a testbed for research on web assisted education. The tutor web system was used both as a learning tool and as a testing tool in a university course on mathematical statistics in the spring of 2020. Around 300 students were enrolled in the course providing tens of thousands of answers to MCQs designed to investigate the effect of the number of distractors and the use of NOTA and AOTA options in questions. The main findings of the study were that the probability of answering a question correctly was highest when a AOTA option was used as a distractor and when NOTA and AOTA were not used in questions. The probability of answering a question correctly decreased with the number of distractors.
Anna Helga Jonsdottir Thorarinn Jonmundsson Inga Huld Armann Birna Borg Gunnarsdottir Gunnar Stefansson
236544254
The Use of Online Video Consultations in the Aftercare of Orthopedic Patients: a Prospective Case control Study
Background: Video consultations have proven to be a powerful support for patient doctor interactions, not only at times of the Covid 19 pandemic. This study analyzed both patients' and doctors' acceptance of an orthopedic telemedical consultation (OTC) and compared the examination results of OTC to live consultation (LC) results for discrepancies.Methods: The study was carried out in an orthopedic department of a German hospital between 2019 and 2020. After written informed consent, patients presented voluntarily for follow ups by OTC and additionally in LC. Both patients and doctors were evaluated for their OTC experience and attitude (Likert scaled and open questions, 26 to 28 items) The examination results of the OTC versus the LC were compared using a 12 items checklist. Data was analyzed by quantitative and qualitative statistics. Results: A total of 53 patient cases were included. The OTC atmosphere was rated as pleasant and the experience as very satisfying (average rating on 5 point Likert Scale, with 1 as strong agreement: doctors: 1.2; patients: 1.3) Various technical and organizational challenges could be identified. OTC, compared to LC, showed no significant differences in patient history, and for results in inspection, palpation and active range of motion. Only in the functional or "passive joint assessment" LC showed a significantly higher suitability (p 0.05) compared to OTC. Recommendations for further procedures as a result from the OTC, did not significantly differ from the LC.Conclusion: Because of the positive acceptance and the objective benefit of OTC, with very similar clinical results to LC, OTC is recommendable for orthopedic follow up examinations. In order to assess the functionality of a joint even better, meaningful digital alternatives for already established examination methods should be further investigated.
Katharina Estel G Weber Felix Fellmer Luise Richter Serafeim Tsitsilonis Christian Willy David Alexander Back
234182743
Blind Electronic Mail System
Web has gotten one of the essential civilities for everyday living. Each individual is generally getting to the information specially E mail and data through Web. Nonetheless, daze individuals face challenges in getting to these content materials, likewise in utilizing any help given through Web. The progression in PC based available frameworks has opened up numerous roads for the outwardly debilitated over the globe in a wide manner. Sound input based virtual climate like, the screen readers have helped Blind individuals to get to Web applications colossally. We depict the Voice mail framework design that can be utilized by a Blind individual to get to messages effectively and productively. The commitment built by this examination has empowered the visually impaired public to deliver and get voice based e mail messages in their local language with the assistance of a PC (Ingle, P. Kanade, H. Lanke, A. 2016)
Maham Imtiaz Samina Khalid Saleema Khadam Sumaira Arshad Ali Raza Tehmina Khalil
233232329
Pain Management A Decade's Perspective of a New Subspecialty
Objective Pain management is increasingly recognized as a formal medical subspecialty worldwide. Israel was among the first to offer a board certified subspecialty, formalized by the Israeli Medical Association in 2010 which is open to all clinicians with a state recognized specialization. This paper aims at evaluating the current program across several quality control measures. Design A survey among pain medicine specialists who graduated from the Israeli Pain Management subspecialty. Methods All 43 graduates of the program were sent a web based questionnaire, each related to a different time in the participants' residency period prior to, during and after training. Results Forty one physicians responded to the survey (95% response rate) The most common primary specialty was Anesthesiology (44% followed by Family Medicine (22% One third of the respondents applied to the program over five years after completing their initial residency. Two thirds reported that they acquired all or most of the professional tools required by a pain specialist. Insufficient training was mentioned regarding addiction management (71% special population needs (54% and interventional treatment (37% A high proportion (82% responded that the examination contributed to their training and almost all perceived their period of subspecialty as having a positive value in their personal development. Two thirds of respondents had not yet actively engaged beyond the clinical aspect with other entities responsible for formulating guidelines and other strategic decision making. Conclusion We hope the findings of this first of a kind survey will encourage other medical authorities to construct formal training in pain medicine and enable this discipline to further evolve.
Journal of pain research
Uri Hochberg Haggai Sharon Iris Bahir Silviu Brill
233297357
Meta Analysis of Correlations between Altmetric Attention Score and Citations in Health Sciences
Introduction In recent years, several controversial reports of the correlation between altmetric score and citations have been published (range: 0.2 to 0.8) We conducted a meta analysis to provide an in depth statistical analysis of the correlation between altmetric score and number of citations in the field of health sciences. Methods Three online databases (Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed) were systematically searched, without language restrictions, from the earliest publication date available through February 29, 2020, using the keywords "altmetric," "citation," and "correlation." Grey literature was also searched via WorldCat, Open Grey, and Google Scholar (first 100 hits only) All studies in the field of health sciences that reported on this correlation were included. Effect sizes were calculated using Fisher's z transformation of correlations. Subgroup analyses based on citation source and sampling methods were performed. Results From 27 included articles, 8 articles comprise several independent studies. The total sample size was 9,943 articles comprised of 35 studies. The overall pooled effect size was 0.19 (95% confidence interval 0.13 to 0.26) Bivariate partial prediction of interaction between effect size, citation source, and sampling method showed a greater effect size with Web of Science compared with Scopus and Dimensions. Egger's regression showed a marginally nonsignificant publication bias (p 0.055) and trim and fill analysis estimated one missing study in this meta analysis. Conclusion In health sciences, currently altmetric score has a positive but weak correlation with number of citations (pooled correlation 0.19, 95% C.I 0.12 to 0.25) We emphasize on future examinations to assess changes of correlation pattern between altmetric score and citations over time.
BioMed research international
Jafar Kolahi Saber Khazaei Pedram Iranmanesh Jeehyoung Kim Heejung Bang Abbasali Khademi
234081080
Impact of online closed book examinations on medical students' pediatric exam performance and test anxiety during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic
Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID 19) has upended medical education, and medical students have had to take online courses and examinations during this pandemic. However, little is known about the impact of proctored online closed book examinations (CBEs) on medical students' exam performance and test anxiety during the COVID 19 pandemic and the contributing factors. Methods: This prospective study was conducted among all 134 third year undergraduate medical students from Shanghai Medical College of Fudan University between February 24 and July 10, 2020. Responses to a self designed 12 item online questionnaire about the impact of online examinations were collected. The final exam scores for classroom examinations in 2019 were collected for comparison. Results: A total of 120 (45 male and 75 female) students with a mean age of 21 years participated in the survey with a 100% response rate. The mean exam scores did not differ by school year, gender, degrees of anxiety and impact groups (P=0.931) Almost 97.5% of medical students experienced test anxiety during online CBEs. Female students (48.0% were more vulnerable to a negative impact of online CBEs than male students (28.9% and preferred (68.0% closed book classroom or open book online examinations more than male students did (48.9% (P=0.003 and P=0.019) The contributing factors included poor adaptation to online examinations (58.5% and concerns about the unfairness of online examinations (41.5% Conclusions: Test anxiety was common in students who lacked experience with online CBEs. Although online CBEs did not impact final exam scores, special attention should be paid to female students who are not adapted to online examinations. Sufficient instruction about the exam platform, individual needs based simulation tests prior to formal exams, and assurance of fairness during the online examination are beneficial to alleviate the negative impact of online examinations on exam performance and test anxiety. Future studies are needed to confirm these findings. (c) 2021 Pediatric Medicine. All rights reserved.
Ruo Zhang Wenwei Qiu Jianqing Shen Jiuyuan Ma Yiming Chai Hao Wu Liyuan Hu Wenhao Zhou