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J Dent Educ. 68(6): 656-659 2004
© 2004 American Dental Education Association
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Educational Methodologies

Influence of Online Formative Assessment Upon Student Learning in Biomedical Science Courses

Byron L. Olson, Ph.D.; James L. McDonald, Ph.D.

Dr. Olson is Professor, Department of Oral Biology, and Dr. McDonald is Professor, Department of Oral Biology and Associate Dean for Dental Education—both at the Indiana University School of Dentistry. Direct correspondence and requests for reprints to Dr. Byron L. Olson, Department of Oral Biology, Indiana University School of Dentistry, 1121 W. Michigan Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202; 317-274-5419 phone; 317-274-2419 fax; bolson{at}iupui.edu.

Key words: formative, summative, assessment

Submitted for publication 12/18/03; accepted 03/31/04

Research suggests that high-quality formative assessment has a strongly positive effect upon student learning. Unfortunately, formative assessment does not appear to be frequently used in didactic dental curricula. Our hypothesis was that providing students with practice online exam questions would enable those who voluntarily took the exam to perform better on subsequent summative exams than did students who did not utilize this opportunity. A test bank of exam questions was written for dental students enrolled in two different biomedical science courses. Half the questions were arbitrarily assigned to an electronic test site; the other half were used as a written summative classroom exam taken later. Students who took the online formative exam in the first semester course scored 8.8 percent higher on the summative exam than did those who did not take the practice exam. This represents almost a full letter grade higher for the formative exam-takers. Students who took the formative online exam in the second semester course scored 5.2 percent higher on the summative exam than did the non-takers. Both of these differences were statistically significant. Under these experimental circumstances, providing formative online exams appeared to promote student performance as reflected by higher scores on the summative exams.




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