Development of an open access student-authored conceptual multiple-choice questions bank and its impact on student learning

A contributing student pedagogy in the form of creating multiple-choice questions, answering, rating, and commenting on the questions made by other learners is implemented in a fourth-year course. An innovative freely available web-based system known as PeerWise is used for developing and maintaining the question repository. Analyzing the level of engagement with PeerWise while controlling for prior students’ ability showed students of lower academic abilities, first quartile, benefited the most from this exercise. Those with higher levels of engagement performed significantly better in the course summative assessment. No significant impact was observed for students in the second, third and fourth quartiles. The quality of questions was assessed by mapping them to Bloom’s taxonomy cognitive levels. Students who developed higher-order MCQs performed significantly better than those who created lower-order MCQs. An online open educational resource in the form of an interactive question bank is also developed based on student-authored questions.