Eur J Anat, 19 (1): 105-124 (2015)

Assessment in anatomy

Erich Brenner^1,5, Andy R.M. Chirculescu^2,5, Concepción Reblet^3,5 and Claire Smith^4,5

¹Division of Clinical and Functional Anatomy, Medical University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria, ¹Department of Anatomy and Embryology, Faculty of Medicine, Carol Davila University, Bucharest, Romania, ³Departamento de Neurociencias, Facultad de Medicina y Odontología, Universidad del Pais Vasco (UPV/EHU), Vizcaya, Spain, ⁴Anatomy, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, University of Sussex Campus, Falmer, United Kingdom, and ⁵Members of the Trans-European Pedagogic Anatomical Research Group (TEPARG)

ABSTRACT From an educational perspective, a very important problem is that of assessment, for establishing competency and as selection criterion for different professional purposes. Among the issues to be addressed are the methods of assessment and/or the type of tests, the range of scores, or the definition of honour degrees. The methods of assessment comprise such different forms such as the spotter examination, short or long essay questions, short answer questions, true-false questions, single best answer questions, multiple choice questions, extended match questions, or several forms of oral approaches such as viva voce examinations.Knowledge about this is important when assessing different educational objectives; assessing educational objectives from the cognitive domain will need different assessment instruments than assessing educational objectives from the psychomotor domain or even the affective domain.There is no golden rule, which type of assessment instrument or format will be the best in measuring certain educational objectives; but one has to respect that there is no assessment instrument, which is capable to assess educational objectives from all domains of educational objectives.Whereas the first two or three levels of progress can be assessed by well-structured written examinations such as multiple choice questions, or multiple answer questions, other and higher level progresses need other instruments, such as a thesis, or direct observation.This is no issue at all in assessment tools, where the students are required to select the appropriate answer from a given set of choices, as in true false questions, MCQ, EMQ, etc. The standard setting is done in these cases by the selection of the true answer.

Keywords: Assessment, Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes, Written exams, Practical exams, Structured observation, Portfolio, Extended matching questions, Spotter tests