117 - An Investigation of Instructor and Student Perceptions of Crib Sheets in Medical Sciences Education

Poster Board Number: 117
There are separate poster presentation times for odd and even posters.
Odd poster #s – first hour
Even poster #s – second hour

Co-authors:

Anita Woods, PhD - Assistant Professor, Physiology and Pharmacology, Western University

Abstract Body : Crib sheets are resources that students are permitted to construct and reference during closed-book exams and are pedagogical tools that have been implemented in higher education. Due to inconsistent study designs, there are conflicting findings in the literature about the effects of crib sheets on grade performance and student anxiety. It is pertinent to understand the full extent of the effects of crib sheets as instructors consider them as a resource to address the rise in anxiety accompanying transitions in education systems throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. As the first investigation of instructor perceptions, this phenomenological study aims to fill gaps in the knowledge of crib sheets by comparing instructor perceptions to those of students who repeatedly created and used crib sheets.



This research leveraged qualitative data to focus on the perceptions of the instructors(n=6) and students(n=72) of two undergraduate medical sciences courses that permitted the use of crib sheets during all closed-book exams. The outlooks of instructors were collected through one-on-one semi-structured interviews and were analyzed by reflexive inductive thematic analysis to identify themes in the perceptions of instructors. Similarly, students completed open-ended reflection questions after each exam and the written accounts of their repeated experiences with crib sheets were also analyzed by reflexive inductive thematic analysis.



The analysis of the instructor-participant interviews unveiled a novel understanding of how the presence of crib sheets impacted instructors. There were no impacts of crib sheets on teaching methods, the only effect was on evaluation methods. Instructors tended to replace recall-based exam questions with application-based questions that required the integration of concepts. Instructors were willing to implement crib sheets in the future as they recognized the tool’s ability to reduce anxiety, however, they recommended the purpose and appropriate use of crib sheets must be communicated to the students. Preliminary comparisons to student data have elucidated a disconnect between instructors’ and students’ perceived impacts of crib sheets on meaningful learning. Instructors considered crib sheets as tools for during the exams, whereas students reported referencing their crib sheets less than they anticipated in exams and found them primarily beneficial during the studying process.



In conclusion, these contrasting findings support the rationale of this investigation to compare the congruency of instructor and student perceptions of crib sheets to establish an inventory of considerations for their use. This is critically important for advising teaching and learning practices of the increasingly relevant pedagogical tool, crib sheets.