This spring again, EDU digital medical school students outperformed peers in the International Progress Test of the European Board of Medical Assessors (EBMA IPT) in Maastricht, the Netherlands.
As part of the quality assurance of teaching and learning of the institution, EDU’s medical students took part in the EBMA International Progress Test (EBMA IPT) for the second time in April of this year, run by the European Board of Medical Assessors (EBMA), benchmarking their progress against the performance of all other institutions that have participated in the EBMA IPT within the last three years.
EDU Student Performance
After excellent results in October last year, this year’s April data indicate once more that, overall, EDU medical students performed well compared to all other students at similar stages of study. Especially, year one students scored significantly higher than other students who took the IPT at a similar time point, while year two and three students’ performance was in line with all other students who took the EBMA IPT at a similar phase in their studies.
The following figure shows the distribution of EDU medical students’ scores (the green boxplot) against all other students’ scores (the red boxplot), with the indicative EBMA IPT grades at the relative measurement moments shown by the lines on the plot.
Digital Pedagogies for the 21st Century
EDU is proud to consistently prove the efficacy of the learning and teaching methods behind its programme in Medicine.
Aiming to support learners in retaining knowledge and developing interpersonal, leadership, and problem-solving skills, EDU’s didactic brings students together to work in groups based on common foundational characteristics and challenges.
This problem-based approach challenges learners to develop relevant and applicable competencies and foster collaboration skills under the guidance of experts, tutors and mentors. Educators can focus on students in EDU’s digital platform, ensuring adequate support and direction in interactive formats–like active learning labs–benefitting from a wealth of data when making effective teaching decisions.
At the backbone of this approach resides a state-of-the-art digital infrastructure for online and blended learning. This technology has been built around EDU’s didactic toolkit and provides extended functionality for the core processes in higher education, including proctored examinations, virtual labs, simulation integration, dynamic digital libraries, and multiple virtual groups and community spaces.
Driven by the Covid pandemic, online education has become standard, yet in most cases only by moving to video, pdf and live communication platforms. , EDU’s results in the EMBA IPT shine a light on the quality potential of digital education, when designed and implemented with the learner at the center from the beginning.
Want to know more about what studying at EDU is like? Join us at our next Virtual Open Day and get a first-hand experience of what your program at EDU will be like, ask questions, and hear more from a current student!
About the EBMA International Progress Test
Progress tests are longitudinal, feedback oriented educational assessment tools for the evaluation of development and sustainability of cognitive knowledge during a learning process. Rather than aiming for mastery of a small amount of knowledge, progress testing assesses incremental improvement in student performance over an extended period of time. The EBMA IPT, running from 2011, has been designed by specialists at Maastricht University and has since expanded to be adopted by a number of selected medical schools worldwide, from Mexico, Australia, Mozambique and Saudi Arabia that have joined the EBMA consortium. The test consists of 100 question items covering a blueprint with 13 distinct systems / domains of medicine.
