Practice it to ace it: students writing practice questions for tests

Asking students to write practice questions for tests is an active learning strategy utilized to facilitate understanding and application of course material. The use of student-generated questions has been studied in medical education and other academic fields but not in undergraduate Anatomy and Physiology (A&P) education. Mixed results from existing literature hint at three possibly important components of effective assignments for students writing test questions: assignment structure, instructor/expert feedback, and alignment with summative assessment. Accordingly, this study investigated the impact of each of these components on students' learning or perceptions of learning. Our methods included <i>1</i>) a reanalysis of papers on medical student question-writing, <i>2</i>) a survey of 22 A&P instructors who have tried this method, and <i>3</i>) detailed studies of efforts at two institutions to implement structured discussion-board assignments in which undergraduate A&P students write and share practice questions. Collectively, these approaches revealed positive correlations between each of the three components and students' learning or perception thereof. In light of these data, especially our students' satisfaction with our implementation of discussion-board assignments, we suggest that structured question-writing and question-sharing activities with instructor feedback and clear connections to summative assessment can increase student engagement and learning.<b>NEW & NOTEWORTHY</b> This paper reports the results of a mixed-methods study of student question-writing assignments. Our results regarding the effect of three intervention parameters (structure, feedback, and alignment) on the learning outcomes of performance and perception suggest that highly structured assignments closely aligned with summative assessments elicit positive learning outcomes when combined with instructor feedback.