As a result of the COVID pandemic, face-to-face education shifted to a mix of online and face-to-face education. In the first-year bachelor’s course “basic pharmacokinetics”, the impact of the pandemic on students’ academic success remains visible. In the years following the pandemic, regular exam performance decreased. What mechanisms underlie this decline, and what specific course adjustments are needed to improve the regular exam performance?

Background information

Apart from the shift from paper-and-pencil to digital exams, all other aspects of the course (e.g. course design, teacher team) remained unchanged and therefore cannot explain the decline in exam performance. A possible explanation for this decline is a change in the complexity in the exam questions and answers after the pandemic. The shift from paper-and-pencil tests to digital testing required the teachers to rethink the exam questions, which may have had (negative) consequences for the exam (Bakes and Cowan, 2019). This change may have led to wordier and more complex exam questions. If the course does not sufficiently train students in the higher-order thinking skills required for these complex digital questions, students may be inadequately prepared and perform poorly.

Aims

This project aims to get insight into the underlying causes for lowered academic success of the regular exam in this first-year course on basic pharmacokinetics after the pandemic and is guided by the following research question:

• To what extent does digital testing increase the complexity of the questions, with lower exam grades for the course basic pharmacokinetics after the pandemic as a result?

Project description

To answer the research question, questions from the pharmacokinetics exam after the pandemic (2022–2024) will be analyzed for complexity and compared with exams from the years prior to the pandemic (2017–2019). This will be done using test matrices that assess exam quality. These matrices are originally based on Bloom’s taxonomy. To see whether Bloom’s taxonomy still captures differences in pharmacological reasoning, alternative classification systems, such as Biggs’ SOLO taxonomy and Legitimate Code Theory, may provide more nuanced ways to categorize questions in the pharmacokinetics exams.

References

• Biggs, J. (1996) Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32, 347–364. https://doi-org.utrechtuniversity.idm.oclc.org/10.1007/BF00138871
• Pignatelli-Espejo, A., Kelly-Laubscher, R., & Barry, Ó. P. (2025). Exploring the knowledge demands of a pharmacology assessment using Legitimation Code Theory. European journal of pharmacology, 996, 177411. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejphar.2025.177411
• Voss, G. (2024). Benjamin S. Bloom: More Than a Taxonomy. In: Geier, B.A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Thinkers. Palgrave Macmillan,