Medical students' vs. family physicians' assessment of practical and logical values of pathophysiology multiple-choice questions

The self-assessment dilemma: an open-source, ethical method using Matlab to formulate multiple-choice quiz questions for online reinforcement

Student self-assessment using computer-based quizzes has been shown to increase subject memory and engagement. Some types of self-assessment quizzes can be associated with a dilemma between 1) medical students who want the self-assessment quiz to be clearly related to upcoming summative assessments or curated by the exam-setters, and 2) university administrators and ethics committees who want clear guarantees that the self-assessment quizzes are not based on the summative assessments or made by instructors familiar with the exam bank of items. An algorithm in Matlab was developed to formulate multiple-choice questions for both ion transport proteins and pharmacology. A resulting question/item subset was uploaded to the Synap online self-quiz web platform, and 48 year 1 medical students engaged with it for 3 wk. Anonymized engagement statistics for students were provided by the Synap platform, and a paper-based exit questionnaire with an 80% response rate ( n = 44) measured satisfaction. Four times as many students accessed the quiz system via laptop compared with phone/tablet. Of 391 questions/items, over 11,749 attempts were made. Greater than 80% of respondents agreed with each of the positive statements (ease of use, enjoyed, engaged more, learned more, and wanted it to be extended to other modules). Despite simplistic questions and rote memorization, the questions developed by this system were engaged with and were received positively. Students strongly supported extending the system.

Comparative Analysis of Family Medicine Education and Exams at Cathedras of Family Medicine of Universities in Southeastern Europe - "Splitska inicijativa", Sarajevo, 2017

Education means: learning, teaching or the process of acquiring skills or behavior modification through various exercises. Traditionally, medical education meant the oral, practical and more passive transferring of knowledge and skills from the educators to students and health professionals. Today the importance of focus on educational quality, particularly in the professions operating in the services required by people is agreed by all involved. The higher educational system shoulders some critical responsibilities in the economic, social, cultural and educational development and growth in the communities. In countries that are in transition it is in charge of educating professional human workforce in every field and if the education is optimal in terms of quality, it is capable of carrying out its responsibilities. It is reason why there is the necessity behind discovering some strategies to uplift the quality of education, especially at university level.. By increasing the courses and establishing universities and higher education centers, the countries around the world have generated more opportunities for learning, especially using modern information technologies. Regarding to evaluating different educational services quality, one of the most important measures should be the way to develop programs to promote quality and also due to the shortage of resources, evaluating the services quality enables the management to allocate the limited financial resources for realization whole educational process. Advances in medicine in recent decades are in significant correlation with the advances in the new models and concepts of medical education supported by information technologies. Modern information technologies have enabled faster, more reliable and comprehensive data collection. These technologies have started to create a large number of irrelevant information, which represents a limiting factor and a real growing gap, between the medical knowledge on one hand, and the ability of students and physicians to follow its growth on the other. Furthermore, in our environment, the term technology is generally reserved for its technical component. This terminology essentially means not only the purchase of the computer and related equipment, but also the technological foresight and technological progress, which are defined as specific combination of fundamental scientific, research and development work that gives a concrete result. The quality of the teaching-learning process at the universities in former Yugoslav countries and abroad, depends mainly of infrastructure that includes an optimal teaching space, personnel and equipment, in accordance with existing standards and norms at the cantonal or entity level, which are required to implement adequately the educational curriculum for students from first to sixth year by Bologna studying concept. For all of this it is necessary to ensure adequate funding. Technologies (medical and information, including communications) have a special role and value in ensuring the quality of medical education at universities and their organizational units (faculties). "Splitska inicijativa" project, which started 6 years ago as simple intention to exchange experiences of application new model of education, based on: Bologna studying concept, and other types of under and postgraduate education, was good idea to improve also theory and practice of it within Family medicine as academic and scientific discipline. This year scope of our scientific meeting held in Sarajevo on 24th and 25th March 2017, was quality assessment of theoretical and practical education and, also, evaluation of knowledge by students exams (a-y).