3.2 Inquiry on Teaching and Learning 3

3.2.1 Our Journey to "Noor's Journey": Documenting our multi-year process of flourishing while creating a learning game focused on diversity, resiliency, and empowerment
Kosha    Bramesfeld, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough Campus, Denise Ysabel Silva, Project Manager, Authentic Learning Lab, Master of Social Work Student (Combined Degree HBSc & MSW), Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work

Learning games provide an effective tool for teaching about complex social issues (Bramesfeld & Good, 2016). The creation of these games can also create high-impact experiential learning opportunities for students across a range of disciplines (Burling et al., 2020). But engaging students in cross-disciplinary research and development teams can create unique training, mentoring, and coordination challenges (Burling et al., 2020; McKerlie et al., 2018; Woolmer et al., 2016).

In this presentation, we present an organizational framework that the Authentic Learning Lab (ALL) has developed to sustain a flourishing multi-year, multi-disciplinary, and multi-campus project focused on developing The Game of Social Life: Journeys. The game uses an interactive-narrative approach to teach about equity, diversity, and inclusion from an intersectional lens. Our framework for developing and evaluating the game has been informed by a participatory research design, in which undergraduate students have been engaged as researchers, project leaders, and participants at every stage of the game development process, from inception, to creation, to evaluation. As part of our presentation, we will share our framework, which is rooted in principles of student leadership, multi-disciplinary collaboration, participatory research, and creative resourcing. And we will share our lessons learned in how to directly involve undergraduate students in the design and development of educational tools, how to integrate participatory research methods at every stage of the design process, and how to utilize existing U of T resources to create a sustainable model of recognition and compensation that can allow these projects to flourish for years to come.

3.2.2 Assessment Validity and Multiple-Choice Questions: a novel approach that considers students’ critiques and corrections
Danielle Bentley, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Division of Anatomy, Department of Surgery, Angelo N. Sotto, MSc Candidate, Institute of Medical Science, Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Traditional multiple-choice questions (tMCQs) are frequently criticized for their limited validity as they fail to credit partial knowledge and often reward guessing. This session explores a novel question style, the critique-and-correct multiple-choice questions (ccMCQs), where students are required to select one correct answer from four possible options AND provide corrections for two of the three remaining distractors. Using data from n = 908 undergraduate embryology students collected over the span of five years, we assessed the predictive power of ccMCQs compared to tMCQs on term test mark, and final course grade. We also assessed the impact of ccMCQs on academic rigour by comparing mean ccMCQ and tMCQ scores, with the hypothesis that ccMCQs would better predict student performance without compromising assessment rigour. Our findings indicate that ccMCQs offer a more promising assessment of student learning compared to tMCQs. While they resulted in slightly higher grades, their stronger predictive validity and lower variability suggest that this shift resembles an authentic assessment of students’ learning, capturing deeper understanding beyond simple recall. This study underscores the potential of this innovative approach to improve assessment methods in higher education, ensuring fair evaluation of learning outcomes in large-class settings. In this session, we will also explore effective design of ccMCQs, discuss how students might approach these questions, and share student feedback about this novel question style.