Faculty Perspective on Implementing a Question-Writing Activity in Physician Assistant Pharmacology Courses

Abstract ID 97522 Poster Board 022 Medical education literature shows that formative assessment greatly benefits learners, especially in the basic sciences. However, the faculty workload to prepare questions or the cost of commercially available question banks can be significant barriers to implementing formative assessments. Additionally, in Pharmacology, many online test banks are unsuitable for or aligned with the physician assistant curriculum. At our institution, we implemented a question-writing activity in our pharmacology course series where learners were required to write course-specific multiple-choice questions and answer questions authored by their peers using an online database called PeerWise. Each learner was required to write 80 questions and answer 160 questions during the academic year. Learners were given guidelines regarding the formatting of the question and had to include an explanation for the correct answer. Our preliminary analysis indicated a positive correlation between the number of questions answered and exam performance, regardless of whether they answered the question correctly. Faculty responsibilities included monitoring the questions for format, content, and ensuring that learners met the minimum requirements to receive credit for the activity. Learners authored over 3000 questions over the year, excluding questions that were deleted for not following the guidelines. On average, faculty spent two hours weekly monitoring the activity. While implementing this activity did contribute to the faculty workload, the intensity and time spent were much less than what would have been spent had the faculty created the 3000 questions. The most common errors committed by learners included the stem not being framed as a question, negatively oriented questions, non-pharmacological questions, and questions without a sufficient explanation of the correct answer. Faculty noted that learners' question writing improved as the year progressed and less faculty intervention was needed. On average, learner satisfaction with the activity is high and faculty appreciate that learners now have course-specific questions to test their knowledge before exams. Furthermore, questions can be exported and edited to create a faculty test bank for future cohorts.