Does formative assessment help students to acquire prescribing skills?

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Clinical Pharmacotherapy
• Healthcare Professional Training

Background:

• Clinical pharmacotherapy (CPT) education requires enhancement due to frequent prescribing errors by junior doctors.
• Formative assessments offer motivational benefits and facilitate learning through feedback.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the impact of a formative assessment with personalized narrative feedback on medical students' prescribing skills.
• To determine if this feedback mechanism improves the technical accuracy of prescriptions.

Main Methods:

• Retrospective cohort study involving master's medical students.
• Comparison of errors in formative and summative skill-based prescription assessments.
• Categorization and analysis of error types and consequences.

Main Results:

• A total of 388 students made 1964 errors in formative and 1016 in summative assessments.
• Significant improvement observed in mentioning child weight on prescriptions (19%).
• Common errors in summative assessment included missing usage instructions (16% new, 41% repeated).

Conclusions:

• Personalized narrative feedback in formative assessments enhances the technical correctness of student prescriptions.
• One formative assessment is insufficient to fully improve clinical prescribing skills.
• Further interventions are necessary to address persistent prescribing errors.