Introduction:

Student assessment is an essential component of all educational programs. Basic science learning is essential for making clinical knowledge meaningful to healthcare students. However, most item writer training is focused on the formulation of clinical questions and does not include a specific approach to basic science questions.

Experience Report:

Workshops on item writing for knowledge application on basic sciences were carried out with the aim of planning a test to be applied at the end of the basic cycle of six health courses. The instructional material was prepared by the authors, who offered online workshops. A differential of this training was the application of models of item lead-in elaboration with defined contexts, using moments of asynchronous preparation and synchronous encounter. After each workshop, surveys were applied to assess participants’ satisfaction and learning. Most participants rated the workshop as good or very good and reported an increase in their perceived ability to prepare single best answer multiple-choice questions. At the end, only 7% reported they were not prepared to write an item following good practices. There was an improvement in the quality of the items prepared, using the difficulty and discrimination indexes as a reference.

Discussion:

There is evidence of the value of faculty development in improving the quality of the questions produced. The proposed workshop format was well evaluated by the participants and contributed to the quality of tests applied to students at the end of the basic science cycle.

Conclusion:

Strategies such this qualify assessments within the school and contribute to the organization of external exams.

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