THE EFFECT OF EDUCATION ON DESIGNING IMPROVEMENT OF MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS WITH STRUCTURAL CRITERIA

The most common test in medicine called Multiple-Choice Questions is highly important in order to promote quality. Such tests have a high reliability degree but in terms of content & structural validity, they are under the attention of many researchers. Thus this study aims to analyze the effect of education on improving multiple-choice questions designing with taxonomy and structural criteria by Basic Sciences Masters of Mazandran Medical University.This study is semi-experimental in the masters group of basic sciences group in two groups of control and experiment. Before and after educational intervention, the groupsʹ questions have been reviewed based on Millmanvalid and reliable checklist with two criteria as taxonomy and structural errors. Data have been analyzed by SPSS.V.16 software and non-parametric tests of Kruskal-Wallis, Mann-Whitney U, and Wilcoxon at significant level of 0.05. 2400 questions analysis results revealed that among the tuition-paid (non-faculty) masters and newly-employed faculty masters, there was no meaningful difference in terms of high taxonomy and structural error-free questions. However, after educational intervention, the questions of the newly-employed masters have got closer to those of the experienced faculty masters in these two criteria. Also experiment group educational intervention pre-and post-analysis showed a meaningful difference and post-intervention scores increase in both criteria (P > 0.001 in Taxonomy II & III and P > 0.000 in structural error-free questions).After educational intervention, a remarkable progress has been observed in structural error-free questions design and in deeper learning levels (Taxonomy II & III).Thus educating all board members at the beginning of their arrival is proposed for improvement and creating quality.