Students’ Perceptions Toward Continuous Assessment in Anatomy Courses

Abstract

Background: Assessment drives learning. Continuous assessment (CA) is used to enhance sustained students’ learning with quality. It has many advantages and some disadvantages. This work aims to study student perceptions toward CA and its implementation and correlate it with their academic achievements. Materials and Methods: To evaluate student’s perceptions toward CA a questionnaire was developed. The data obtained from both the questionnaire and student’s results were analyzed. Results: CA helped students in learning (100%), identifying areas of weakness (20.3%), and answering the final exam (5.8%). Time intervals between the tools of assessment were not enough for 89% of the students, and 98.3% responded that the used tools were enough for evaluation. Marks distribution of the CA was good for 73.8% of the students. The majority of the students (97.1%) reported that CA did not pose an extra academic load. All the students (99.4%) preferred the use of the CA as part of the assessment and 94.8% of the students preferred replacing the final exam with the CA. Conclusions: CA is recently implemented. Divergent responses of students can be explained by the lack of student experience and familiarity. Tools of assessment should be planned carefully. Students prefer the use the CA instead of the single final examination. Students view about CA is representing its core philosophy.

Keywords

• continuous assessment
• student perception
• tools of assessment.