PeerWise: Making exam questions as a student to learn!

During the EBMA annual conference: Crossing boundaries- assessment in medical education on October 14 2016, Jason Walsh of Cardiff University presented the evaluation of a formative assessment that they used at their medical school. They used the free software program PeerWise. A promising tool where students construct examen questions (multiple choice). This makes them think about the content, what a good question would be (and hence what they should know or gain insight in), what alternatives they should offer and hence determine what is not related to the question. In addition they also should add feedback to the different answer possibilities. Other students can then solve the questions or comment on the questions, for instance if they do not agree with the answer or with the feedback provided. From the evaluation done at Cardiff university it seems that students who construct questions and comment on questions benefit in term of knowledge gain, while this is not the case for just answering the questions.

Over two years, two cohorts (respectively 297 and 306 students) constructed 4971 questions, answered 606658 times and posted 7735 comments discussing the questions.

And perhaps you can even use some of the questions as real exam questions…..

 To get more information visit the website https://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/. You can register for free, and in any case look at some short introduction videos. Below a short introduction is shown.

If you want to try this out in your education, please let us know!