Faculty development program for under-graduate’s item pool foundation in Human Anatomy and Embryology
Creators: name: Husseiny, Nancy
Publisher: name: F1000 Research Limited
Year: 2023

description: <b><i>Background</i></b><br> There is a dire need for an efficient, well-structured item pool in the modern era and with the revolution of digital transformation. For any assessment, it's crucial to have high-quality questions. This is especially true for summative evaluations where applicants' performance will affect their advancement. Instead of just testing factual recall, problem-solving questions with brief vignettes can serve as a mirror image of the clinical situations that we are preparing students to handle as licensed physicians. Such questions are not easily to write since they require experience and training. Faculty development courses in order to allow for proper sampling, the questions must be evenly distributed across the curriculum in terms of subject breadth, were always a cornerstone for this goal. A series of workshops on correct item formulation must be held with the department's entire workforce in mind to close this gap that the faculty members weren’t well oriented about the international standards of a well- structured test item.<br> <b>Summary of Work</b><br> After institutional approval of the faculty development program, we selected the program team from the stakeholders who were trained on basics in assessment and how to formulate a well-structured item of 4 types of test item; (Single Best Answer (SBA), Extended Matching Questions (EMQs), Short answered Questions (SAQs) and Structured Essay Questions (SEQs). Full capacity building of 34 staff members in Human anatomy and Embryology was achieved. Pre and post- tests were done to all staff members sharing in this work to evaluate the level of obtained skills in item formulation. Moreover, multiple assignments were implemented throughout the training courses to detect the weakness and strength points with all trainees to improve the net results of the whole work.<br> <b>Summary of Results</b><br> Item Pool formulation for all modules in which anatomy discipline shares was completed by the end of second week of October 2021. The well-structured items that were collected for the item pool, which exceeded 1200 items, and carefully revised internally and externally, scientifically and technically to be ready for the digitalized item bank as a fundamental step for electronic exams, showed a statistically significant improvement on the post-test, which was confirmed.<br> <b>Discussion and Conclusion</b><br> The workshop series that were accomplished and had a significant positive impact on the staff members' abilities to write items and choose the appropriate data for vignettes and other item modalities. The goals were to improve the writing abilities of a large number of staff members, implement an item pool in alignment with learning outcomes prior to the actual implementation of the pool, benefit from the questions gathered to increase the validity and reliability of the undergraduate anatomy exam, modify staff teaching strategies and resources to match assessment tools like TBL and case vignettes, and graduate competent health care professionals.<br> <br> <b>Take Home Messages</b><br> As the assessment drives learning, a great efforts have to be directed to improve its written part quality which by its turn will enhance the whole learning and teaching cycle. Further efforts are required for continuous auditing to the accomplished pool to guarantee the fairest evaluation.<br> <b>References </b><br> Vanderbilt, Allison A, Moshe Feldman, and IsaacK Wood. "Assessment in undergraduate medical education: a review of course exams." <i>Medical education online</i> 18.1 (2013): 20438.