Authors

  1. Vogelsang, Laura MN, RN

Article Content

When preparing for examinations and ultimately for the NCLEX-RN, students often approach their faculty for practice questions. Although incorporating questions into a lecture may be an effective teaching strategy, usually, the number of questions is limited because, once they are used in class, they are no longer valid for an examination. Students were challenged to develop their own questions related to content that had been covered in class in exchange for 1 bonus mark on their most recent quiz. The guidelines were that the questions had to evaluate higher-level thinking (no memorization) and the rationale for the correct answer had to be included. Any question format used on the NCLEX-RN was allowed. All of the questions were combined into a document and reviewed by the instructor for accuracy. The document was made available to all students as a study tool for the remainder of the course. More than 80% of the class participated in the exercise, and most stated that they accessed the student-created examination at some point during the course as a study tool. Although motivation for developing the questions largely came from gaining an additional bonus mark, anecdotally, students reported that the exercise itself was valuable in challenging them to fully understand a concept to develop a question. Several students also reported that the exercise gave them an appreciation for the work and time that goes into examination question development for nursing courses.