Effective Feedback Strategy for Formative Assessment in an Integrated Medical Neuroscience Course

Purpose: Despite the different benefits of formative assessments in an integrated medical curriculum, the effective strategies to provide feedback to medical students to benefit from the different merits of formative assessment are not fully understood. This study aims to determine the effect of different strategies of formative feedback on students' outcomes in a medical neuroscience course.

Method: We compared medical students' performance in summative examinations in the academic year that formative feedback was provided using in-person discussion and compared such performances with the academic year when the feedback was provided by written rationales or a combination of written rationales and in-person discussion. We also surveyed medical students' preferences for whether written or in-person formative feedback is a better strategy to provide feedback at the end of each course.

Results: ANOVA found a significant difference in summative performance scores for those scoring ≥ 70% when formative feedback was provided by providing a rationale, in-person, and a combination of both ([ (2,80) = 247.60,  < 0.001]. Post hoc analysis revealed a significant and highest performance when feedback was provided using the written rationale approach (*** < 0.05), followed by in-person (** < 0.05). In contrast, the least performance was recorded when formative feedback was provided using a combination of providing a written rationale for the answers to the questions and in-person discussion of the questions (* < 0.05). Students' preferred approach for receiving formative feedback for their formative assessment was highest for written rationale (*** < 0.05), followed by in-person or a combination of in-person and written rationale (** < 0.05).

Conclusion: Our results found that medical students preferred a written formative feedback approach, which was associated with better student performance on the summative examination. This study reveals the importance of developing effective strategies to provide formative feedback to medical students for medical students to fully benefit from the merits of formative assessment in an integrated medical school curriculum.