ArticleEuropean journal of clinical pharmacology2023
Does formative assessment help students to acquire prescribing skills?
Article in European journal of clinical pharmacology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Development and Validation of a Teaching Module for Prescription Writing for Dental Students: A Randomized Controlled Trial.Journal of dental education · 2025Trial
- Confidence in Prescribing Practices: Perspectives of Senior Medical Students and Recent Graduates at Qatar University.Advances in medical education and practice · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeFormative assessments can help motivate students and ease students' learning through feedback. There is a pressing need for improvement of clinical pharmacotherapy (CPT) education since junior doctors make many prescribing errors. The aim of this study was to determine whether a formative assessment with personalized narrative feedback helps medical students to increase their prescribing skills.
methodsThis retrospective cohort study was conducted among masters' medical students at Erasmus Medical Centre, The Netherlands. Students made a formative and a summative skill-based prescription assessment, both during clerkships as part of their regular curriculum. Errors in both assessments were categorized by type and possible consequence and compared with each other.
resultsA total of 388 students made 1964 errors in the formative assessment and 1016 in the summative assessment. Most improvements after the formative assessment were seen for mentioning the weight of a child on the prescription (n = 242, 19%). Most new and repeated errors in the summative assessment were missing usage instructions (n = 82, 16% and n = 121, 41%).
conclusionsThis formative assessment with personalized and individual narrative feedback has helped students to increase the technical correctness of their prescriptions. However, errors repeated after the feedback were predominantly errors showing that only one formative assessment has not yet enhanced the clinical prescribing enough.
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