Assessment of Higher Cognitive Domain in the Subject of Community Medicine:Perceptions of Students and Faculty

Background: ‘Assessment drives learning’. A higher level of assessment will have better educational impact on the learner. The conventional assessment tools for cognitive domain assess more of factual knowledge than the applied. The overall goal of Community Medicine is to prepare the undergraduates to function as community and first level physicians and handle real life primary healthcare delivery situations. Contextual or scenario based assessment may help to achieve this goal. Aims and Objectives: 1. To assess the perceptions of undergraduate students and faculty towards higher cognitive assessment in the subject of Community Medicine and 2. To compare the performance of students between traditional and higher cognitive assessment. Materials and Methods: In the present medical educational project, 35 students from 7th semester MBBS were randomly selected. The assessment tool consisted of 5 Structured Short Answer Questions (SAQs) in two parts each. The first part was factual assessment question and the second question was applied aspect assessing the same knowledge area. The scores of students in factual and applied aspect were compared. Also, the perceptions of students and faculty were obtained using a pre-validated questionnaire on a 5 point Likert scale. Results: There was no significant difference between the scores of factual and applied aspect assessment. The students perceived the newer assessment positively. They opined that it will help them imagine real life scenarios, make the subject learning interesting, may increase the retention span and they would prefer it over the factual/mugging-up assessment. The faculty also perceived it positively for better learning by students and it will require more time, planning and efforts than the routine assessments. Conclusion: The higher cognitive domain assessment was perceived positively by both the students and faculty.