Dr Albert Lee is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Biomedical Sciences in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. Albert is passionate about educating and inspiring students to lead future healthcare improvements. He has recently applied a scientific approach to design and deliver a new unit for the Faculty; a unit that invites students to complete a diagnostic assessment quiz in Week 0. Results of the quiz support student learning and guide the planning of weekly lectures.
What is Albert passionate about?
Every student has their own unique and valuable life experiences and my goal is to adapt my teaching approach to ensure each student achieves a better understanding of scientific and medical research to achieve positive outcomes.
Dr Albert Lee
Albert is not a traditional ‘didactic’ lecturer; his teaching approach is to provide students with a set of tools and principles that allow them to critically think and analyse complex issues to become lifelong learners and contribute to society. This is a thoughtful philosophy of teaching, and one that aligns with MQ Health’s “Heal, Learn, Discover” vision.
What are you most proud of now?
In an exercise that must have taken Albert hours to complete, he compared the University of Melbourne’s Doctor of Medicine (MD) program pre-requisites with topics covered in the MQU Bachelor of Clinical Science program to determine whether our students would be granted entry to the highest-ranked medical program in the country. His finding was a significant discovery – UniMelb’s biochemistry prerequisite could potentially prohibit MQU students from its MD or Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) programs. Albert then set about analysing the learning outcomes of UniMelb’s biochemistry units to establish which topics and practical knowledge were missing from MQU units. From this meticulous research, Albert set about building MEDI304, ensuring that the unit had practical and theoretical components that exceed the learning outcomes from UniMelb. Clearly, Albert’s aim was to confidently prepare MQU students for any MD program in the country.
What do feedback and MCQs have to do with student success?
After assembling MEDI304 Albert applied himself to scholarly educational literature on ‘feedback’ and writing effective ‘multiple-choice questions’ with the aim of designing a diagnostic intervention assessment tool for MEDI304 students. Albert proceeded to build the diagnostic quiz in iLearn from quiz banks of earlier units and textbook resources to ensure that students’ foundational knowledge was current and sufficient.
How do you use diagnostic assessment results?
Analysis of the optional and formative diagnostic quiz results enabled Albert to target his teaching to the topics in the diagnostic quiz that produced the weakest scores. Albert also provided extra learner support resources from the Faculty’s Connected Curriculum bank, ensuring that students ‘catch-up’ on any gaps in their knowledge.
In week 2, Albert repeats the quiz as a way of reviewing whether his revision of topics and provision of supplementary learner resources has impacted on student learning. An iLearn quiz provides an easy and immediate statistical analysis of each question (contact your Learning Designers to find out how). Any topic identified as weak in the early diagnostic quiz should improve by Week 2 if students have addressed the gap in their knowledge. Occasionally a newly introduced topic emerges as a topic that needs revision. Albert is now clear about what topic needs revision in week 3. He continues to repeat this process throughout the session.
How do diagnostic assessment tests help students?
Albert’s approach of revisiting, reviewing and re-assessing earlier and important foundational concepts is meticulous and undeniably helpful to students’ achievement. He is humble but not indifferent to the required effort to frontload this diagnostic process. He tells me that this type of formative assessment has a large impact on student achievement and his satisfaction with teaching.
There is a large body of knowledge to cover in MEDI304, if students don’t have the foundational knowledge, they are lost for the whole Unit. I didn’t want that to happen.
Dr Albert Lee
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