Perceived value and use of assessment software exam summary reports by student pharmacists
Authors: Dirks-Naylor Amie 
Published: May 2023

A growing number of higher education institutions are using assessment software to better identify curricular weaknesses/gaps, to track student performance, and to generate individual exam summary reports for distribution to students. Feedback to students regarding assessment performance improves metacognition and learning strategies. Return and review of graded assessments is a common means of providing feedback. However, many instructors are hesitant to do so for several reasons. Providing students with individual assessment summary reports is an alternative resource embraced by faculty. Currently, there is no mechanism to track the number of students who read the summary reports nor is it known their perceived value of the reports. Thus, the objective of this study was to determine student utilization and perceived benefit of the exam summary reports generated by the assessment software. Methods: ExamSoft assessment summary reports have been emailed to students after each exam in most courses for the past several years in a PharmD pharmacy program. The summary reports provided information pertaining to areas of strengths/weaknesses, but did not contain specific exam questions and answers. An anonymous Qualtrics survey pertaining to use and perceived value of the summary reports was emailed to all current students enrolled in the pharmacy program. Methods were approved by the institutional IRB. Results: Overall, 58% of the respondents “always” or “most of the time” read the exam summary reports while 20% “never” or “rarely” did so. The rest read the reports “about half the time.” Approximately 55% and 50% agree that the summary reports are useful for determining strengths/weaknesses and how to improve performance in a course, respectively. The two most often cited reasons for not reading the reports are that they forget or don’t find them useful. The most commonly cited recommendation to improve the usefulness of the reports was to include the assessment questions. Furthermore, as the preferred method of receiving feedback, the majority (52%) preferred meeting with the professor to review specific questions/answers that they missed on the exam. Approximately 72% disagreed with the sentiment that once they complete a course exam they were not really interested in learning their weaknesses regarding the material assessed on the exam. When trying to improve performance in a course, they most often follow the advice of the professor(s) teaching the course (57%) or their peers (35%). Responses to questions varied by academic strength of the student and year in pharmacy school with later years in school having the greatest negative impact. Conclusions: Although the majority of students do consistently read the exam summary reports and found them useful, a larger than expected minority did not. In general, students prefer specific feedback. Thus, the summary reports should be as specific as possible in order to get buy-in. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2023 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.