Can contextual online exams in practical biomedical education increase comprehension and motivation?: a pilot project

The exclusive reproduction of short-term learned and pool-based contents in examinations may impede development of in-depth understanding. This pilot project suggests an approach useful to overcome this shortcoming by enhancing students' motivation for comprehensive learning using automatically added contextual questions in electronic examinations. Installed in practical courses teaching pain physiology, digital data acquisition and examination workstations were interlinked via a network connection. The data acquisition software was substantiated by algorithms that evaluated data acquired before their transmission to examination workstations. These data were used by the assessment software operating on these workstations to automatically compose new examination questions. Examinations thus combined pool questions with newly generated questions with authentic digitized data from the preceding course. This helped confront students with questions based on their individual data that had resulted from the courses examined. Formative evaluation showed an increase in motivation and alertness for practical tasks and acquired results. This suggests usefulness of this setting in examining the preparation and comprehension of course contents. There is reason to assume that this approach is suitable to be transferred to other practical courses using digital acquisition of practical and examination data.