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Let’s Make a Quiz: Designing an Effective Quiz For Anatomy Students

Welcome to the second blog of our “Let’s Make a Quiz” series, where we will be discussing strategies to design an effective quiz for anatomy students in a digital environment. For our readers who want to know more about “Let’s Make a Quiz” blog series and its first publication, please click here (hyperlink click here to the blog titled, “Let’s Make a Quiz: Designing an Effective Quiz for STEM Education”).

Exploring the Objectives of an Anatomy Curriculum

The objective of any anatomy education curriculum is to:

·         Equip students with the basic and advanced vocabulary of the discipline

·         Help them understand the morphology, functionality and pathology of biological structures and how they are interrelated.

·         Allow candidates to utilize their knowledge of the discipline in clinical settings and help find solution to real-life anatomical problems. 

It is important that the readers keep in mind the learning objectives of an anatomy education curriculum. So that, when they are designing a quiz on a quiz software, the assessment questions should be able to evaluate an examinee accordingly.  

The Strategy in Practice

In an anatomy quiz you will be assessing the theoretical, practical and clinical knowledge of the candidate.

Questions for Testing Theoretical Knowledge

Examiners should opt for a set of questions that are free-response in nature. Free response questions (essay questions) help in assessing the theoretical requirements of an anatomical curriculum, like describing different types of neurons in the central nervous system and their function. There are plenty of online quiz software that allow you to incorporate essay based questions in your quiz. However, please check the limit of characters that a software allows before publishing a theoretical question.

Questions for Testing Practical Knowledge

Free response questions can work for theoretical assessment, but, when it comes to practical evaluation, they can appear to be redundant.   

Why look for a detailed answer when the examinee is only required to identify a structure and interpret its functionality based on the visible findings?

Surely, you can achieve the objectives of practical assessment with the help of spotter based MCQs.

·         You can mount different microscopic slides and bone samples at different stations and ask the student to click the best option that identifies with them.

·         You can also integrate pictures of these microscopic slides with the published quiz and ask the students to exhibit their practical understanding of the discipline. This can be easily done through online quiz software. 

Doesn’t this strategy restrict student from going beyond the level of knowledge in the thinking pyramid of Bloom Taxonomy? Can you make it more explorative?

This is possible if you innovate the traditional principles of a spotter exam. For example, instead of simply asking the students to identify the structure and click on the name that identifies with it, you can provide the functions of the structures and instruct students to select the one that associates with the identified structure.  

Questions for Testing Clinical Knowledge

Conducting clinical assessment can be a tricky part but it is possible with video based MCQs. You can provide a video of a patient suffering from pathology, and ask students various questions based on it. But for that you will need an online quiz software that allows you to embed videos with your published quiz.  

 

 

By following these tips and strategies you can design an effective quiz for your anatomy students. If you think you can add to the discussion by suggesting more useful tips, why not drop your comments in the section below. We look forward to hearing from you.