Optimising Medical Education: The Power and Potential of One Best Answer (OBA) Questions

Abstract

One best answer (OBA) questions are widely used in medical education as a formative and summative assessment tool to assess the knowledge, decision-making, and critical thinking of students. OBAs provide a medical scenario and several potential responses which students must choose the best response from the options. This review of OBAs aims to establish how the assessments work by noting their capacity to assess higher-order cognitive skills, which are helpful in clinical practice. Some of the important elements in the construction of good OBA questions are as follows: They should be clear, clinically relevant, have plausible distractors and should be able to assess higher cognitive skills. It is found that when students are encouraged to use OBAs, it allows for enhanced learning and knowledge retention. Also, the benefit of OBAs as a form of assessment is compared to other methods like essay questions and oral examination in terms of objectivity in scoring, simplicity of the assessment technique and flexibility of the assessment in covering a wide content area. Nevertheless, OBAs also have their shortcomings, for example, they may be ambiguous and, in general, it is not easy to come up with good plausible distractors. However, OBAs remain a useful form of assessment in medical education, if used in combination with other assessment procedures that would ensure the holistic evaluation of student competence.