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. 2016 Jan 29;11(1):e0148051. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0148051

Fig 1. Student performance on exam questions in the context of question familiarity.

Fig 1

Student performance on (A) Molecular Biology (MB) and (B) Human Anatomy (A) exam questions sorted by familiarity according to prerequisite course lecture slides. For the MB analysis, exam questions were analyzed from both the 2014 and 2015 courses and significant differences were determined using a one-way ANOVA followed by Tukey’s test (comparing VF vs. F, F vs. NF, and VF vs. NF performance). Because the A data were not normally distributed, they were analyzed with the Kruskal-Wallis test and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test and Bonferroni correction. * p ≤ 0.05, ** p ≤ 0.01, *** p ≤ 0.001. Student performance on twelve randomly selected 2014 (C) MB and (D) A exam questions sorted by familiarity according to instructors of the prerequisite courses. (E) Student performance on 2014 MB exam questions sorted by familiarity according to a focus group consisting of nine former G students. Question familiarity was characterized in each case as described in the methods. Average performance between categories was not significantly different for C-E as determined using one way ANOVA (C, E) or Kruskal-Wallis (D) tests. For A-E, mean performance values for questions in each category are indicated along with the standard error of the mean (SEM).