For medical school, physician assistant, and other health science education faculty, student assessment can be challenging simply due to curricular volume. ScholarRx, an innovative digital learning platform for medical and health science education, offers a powerful, flexible exam solution through a partnership with ExamSoft – Rx Bricks Assessment Banks.
Rx Bricks Assessment Banks provide reliable, high-quality assessment items for medical schools and other health science programs – created by ScholarRx and powered by ExamSoft, preloaded directly into your ExamSoft account. Rx Bricks Assessment Banks include 1,800 board-style questions with complete explanations written by expert medical educators from around the world.
Here’s what faculty members are saying about Rx Bricks Assessment Banks:
Use Case: Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine
Gabi N. Waite, PhD, CMHFA
Professor of Physiology and Immunology and Vice Chair of Education
John Szarek, BPharm, PhD, CHSE
Professor of Pharmacology and Vice Chair of Curriculum
How have you been using the Rx Brick Assessment Banks preloaded in your ExamSoft account?
We complement our faculty-written questions, which are already in ExamSoft, with the Rx Bricks Assessment Banks. In our curriculum, we have three types of uses for faculty sequestered questions: Weekly end-of-week quizzes, systems block exams, and remediation exams. In ExamSoft, we can tag the questions based on our curriculum map, which then allows for easy sorting and linking of our own items and Bricks questions. Furthermore, in ExamSoft, we can edit the questions based on our curricular content and save a new version, without losing the original question. That way, we can build sets of questions around core concepts.
What are the biggest benefits you hope to derive from this?
We start a new 18-month preclinical curriculum in August, which currently keeps us pretty busy. With the Rx Bricks Assessment Banks, we hope that faculty can focus in this first round of the curriculum on building in-class activities while at the same time expanding our vignette-style application questions with the Bricks questions. We hope to soon reach a critical number of questions in ExamSoft that allows us to create equivalent block remediation exams and/or individual student remediation exams around selected topics.
Use Case: University of St. Joseph Connecticut
Mary Lebatique Minto, M.H.S., PA-C
Assistant Professor of Physician Assistant Studies
How do you anticipate using the Rx Bricks Assessment Banks preloaded in your ExamSoft account?
Because of the number and variety of questions in the Rx Bricks Assessment Banks, we anticipate using them in a variety of ways. We have always utilized Rx Bricks in our integration modules, which are a review of multiple body system modules that were covered throughout the semester.
Based on our post-written exam longitudinal analyses, we are able to determine the areas the students require remediation in as a cohort, and we utilize the Rx Bricks for online review. Now, with the Rx Bricks Assessment Bank questions, we will be able to choose corresponding questions to incorporate into a post-review quiz.
In addition, these Assessment Banks and their direct integration with Rx Bricks may also be useful for individualized student remediation. We may be able to incorporate them into post-exam remediation assignments before students retest three days later. Being able to assign an appropriate Rx Brick would provide an additional resource for our struggling students, and the questions would provide more application of concepts before the retest.
What are the biggest benefits you hope to derive from this?
The questions, especially the vignette-style questions, allow for more application and integration of concepts taught in the classroom and reviewed with Rx Bricks.
When paired with the Rx Bricks product, we anticipate that the Rx Bricks Assessment Banks will amplify and reinforce the teaching we do in our classrooms and allow us to demonstrate that our students successfully achieve the learning outcomes in all body system modules.
With Rx Bricks Assessment Banks, our students will not only have increased access to learning materials, the questions provide them with more opportunities to apply and integrate the information they learn and review.
Use Case: Gulf Medical University, United Arab Emirates
Gomathi Kadayam Guruswami
Associate Dean Academics
Professor and Head, Department of Biomedical Sciences
College of Medicine
How have you used the Rx Bricks Assessment Banks in your program?
We have used it for two summative exams so far. The end of module tests for the cardiovascular system and reproductive system in year 2 and year 3, respectively. Two more exams are coming up for the respiratory system and the nervous system.
How has the experience been so far?
The experience has been very smooth for us, since we are very familiar with ExamSoft. Students are comfortable too, as all our exams are on the same platform. Since the questions are tagged with the themes/topics, selecting questions is very easy.
We set the system up so that students get to know their mistakes as well as the rationale for the correct answer immediately after the exam in the testing center. All exams on ExamSoft are conducted at the testing center within GMU and are proctored by us. This way we manage to ensure the security of the assessment bank and the integrity of the whole process.
For more information about how Rx Bricks Assessment Banks within ExamSoft could improve assessments and add value at your university, visit ScholarRx.com/Bricks-Assessment/.
