Designing formative assessment for medium class-size teaching in an undergraduate biochemistry program

Abstract

Biochemistry is a rapidly advancing science such that it is virtually impossible to cover every aspect of the discipline in a time-constrained undergraduate curriculum. The “less-is-more” principle is therefore always adopted to guide program and course designs. The teaching and learning of biochemistry at the undergraduate level thus place much emphasis on the acquisition of intellectual skills that will enable life-long and self-motivated learning. The training of a scientific mind is a continuous process that it ideally not only requires the instructor to understand the way of thinking of individual students, the direct participation of the students in the training process is also needed. The above issues are usually addressed by the adoption of formative assessment conducted as tutorial classes. However, whether the tutorial questions have been appropriately designed to address the actual needs of students may not be known until the time when student answers of tutorial questions are being reviewed and discussed. Thus the discovery of specific “learning problems” of students has to precede and be addressed in the design of continuous/formative assessments. A trial study was therefore conducted in the teaching of one intermediate and one advanced Biochemistry course in which each student attending the class was requested to submit up to three short end-of-lecture questions. These questions were then reviewed by the instructor and formed the basis of subsequent whole class discussion sessions. Major findings are as follow. Firstly, students in the advanced course could readily submit questions at end of each lecture than did students in the intermediate course. Secondly, the submitted questions had proven to serve as a fertile ground for in-depth and enthusiastic discussion amongst students. Thirdly, the award of assessment scores could markedly improve student participation in such an exercise. The above study suggests that the submission of end-of-lecture questions is an effective means for the early discovery of specific problems in student learning and informed subsequent actions in enhancing student learning. The applicability of such an approach could be enhanced by e-Learning technologies that may offset some of the technical issues identified in the study.