FormaVet: Developing a large bank of formative clinical MCQs with feedback in PeerWise

FormaVet: Developing a large bank of formative clinical MCQs with feedback in PeerWise
Sarah Baillie, Lucy Hughes, Donald Yool, Wendela Wapenaar, Hannah Woodward, Cherry Phypers, Alex Seguino, Veronica Roberts, Scott Pirie, Paul Wood, Ellie Sellers, John Remnant, Christina Maunder, Sheena Warman, Kate Cobb, Susan Rhind
Background: A Veterinary Schools Council Education Committee initiative aimed to create a bank of formative MCQs to be shared between veterinary schools by consolidating pre-existing questions. The intention was to provide students with high quality MCQs in clinical vignette, single best answer format with feedback to enhance learning and preparation for rotations and summative examinations.
Summary of work: Formative MCQs used for final year students at Edinburgh, Bristol and Nottingham veterinary schools were collated. All questions were reviewed and edited by a team of clinicians and experts in current best practice for writing clinical vignette MCQs. Feedback was reviewed and added (if absent) and was designed to explain both the clinical reasoning for the answer and why other options were not/less appropriate. The edited questions are available for use in staff training. Questions were tagged by species, clinical discipline or system and stage of clinical reasoning. Questions were uploaded into PeerWise, which is typically used for students to create questions but in this instance became a repository for a large bank of nearly 500 formative MCQs called ‘FormaVet’. Students do not edit or create questions but can rank them on difficulty and provide an overall rating, information that will be helpful for reviewing questions. The bank is being used extensively by students as preparation for rotations and exams including the NAVLE.
Take home message: The collaboration and thorough review process have resulted in a large bank of high quality MCQs with feedback - a valuable learning resource for students.