Introduction: The main purpose of formative assessment is to improve students' learning and it should be seen as a part of the learning process. Game-based learning has become more common in the education and one of the emerging game-based learning platform used in education institutions is Kahoot. This paper investigated the perception of students towards Kahoot as a formative assessment tool in undergraduate medical education and its association with gender. Methods: A cross-sectional study was carried out on first year medical students in a Malaysian public medical school. The study employed a survey that consists of 12 items through Kahoot survey platform. Result: A total of 113 subjects participated in this study; majority was female (68.1%) and Malay (58.4%). The students highly perceived Kahoot as fun, effective and better than e-learning platform for feedback as its median score was 4. The rest of items were satisfactorily perceived by the students as indicated by the score of 3 except for simplifying complex subjects that obtained unsatisfactory level. There were significant median score differences between male and female students for motivation and perceived knowledge retention, whereby males scored higher than females (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Kahoot is a promising formative assessment tool that is feasible, practical and makes learning fun and enjoyable. It can be used to motivate students to learn. However, Kahoot was not the best tool to simplify complex subjects as perceived by medical students.

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Background Gamification is an increasingly common phenomenon in education. It is a technique to facilitate formative assessment and to promote student learning. It has been shown to be more effective than traditional methods. This phenomenological study was conducted to explore the advantages of gamification through the use of the Kahoot! platform for formative assessment in medical education. Methods This study employed a phenomenological design. Five focus groups were conducted with medical students who had participated in several Kahoot! sessions. Results Thirty-six categories and nine sub-themes emerged from the focus group discussions. They were grouped into three themes: attractive learning tool, learning guidance and source of motivation. Conclusions The results suggest that Kahoot! sessions motivate students to study, to determine the subject matter that needs to be studied and to be aware of what they have learned. Thus, the platform is a promising tool for formative assessment in medical education. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12909-019-1658-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Background Smartphone plays a vital role in higher education as it serves as a device with multiple functions. Smartphone addiction was reported on the rise among college and university students. The addiction may result in unwanted consequences on their academic performance and psychological health. One factor that consistently relates to psychological distress and smartphone addiction is the neurotic personality trait. This study explored the relationship of smartphone addiction with psychological health and neuroticism among USM medical students. Methods A cross-sectional study was carried out on medical students in a public medical school. DASS-21, the neuroticism-subscale of USMaP-i and SAS-SV were administered to measure psychological distress, neuroticism, and smartphone addiction of the medical students. Spearman correlation was performed to examine the correlation between smartphone addiction with psychological distress and neuroticism. Simple linear regression was performed to investigate relationship factors of smartphone addiction. Results A total of 574 medical students participated in this study. The prevalence of smartphone addiction was 40.6%. It was higher among male (49.2%) compared to female (36.6%) medical students. The result showed a fair positive correlation between smartphone addiction and psychological health (rdepression = 0.277, p-value < 0.001; ranxiety = 0.312, p-value < 0.001; rstress = 0.329, p-value < 0.001). However, there was a poor positive correlation between smartphone addiction and neuroticism (r = 0.173, p-value < 0.001). The simple linear regression showed a significant increase in the levels of depression, anxiety, stress and neuroticism upon one unit increase in smartphone addiction (bdepression = 0.101, p-value < 0.001; banxiety = 0.120, p-value < 0.001; bstress = 0.132, p-value < 0.001; bneuroticism = 0.404, p-value < 0.05). These results indicated significant relationships between smartphone addiction, psychological health and neuroticism. Conclusion This study suggested a high prevalence of smartphone addiction among medical students, particularly in male medical students. The smartphone addiction might lead to psychological problems and the most vulnerable group is the medical student with the neurotic personality trait.

Purpose Most of the resilience scales were developed for the non-medical population, therefore the purpose of this study was developing and validating a resilience scale for medical professionals – namely Medical Professionals Resilience Scale (MeRS). Methods A questionnaire development and validation study was conducted. The resilience domains and items were identified and generated through a literature review. The content validation was carried out by content experts and the content validity index (CVI) was calculated. The face validation was performed by medical officers and the face validity index (FVI) was calculated. The final MeRS was administered to 167 medical officers, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and reliability analysis were performed to assess MeRS’s factorial structure and internal consistency. Results Four domains with 89 items of medical professionals’ resilience were developed. Following that, the content and face validation was conducted, and a total of 41-items remained for construct validation. EFA extracted four factors, namely growth, control, involvement, and resourceful, with a total of 37 items. The items’ CVI and FVI values were more than 0.80. The final MeRS’s items had factor loading values ranged from 0.41 to 0.76, and the Cronbach’s alpha values of the resilience domains ranged from 0.72 to 0.89. Conclusions MeRS is a promising scale for measuring medical professionals’ resilience as it showed good psychometric properties. This study provided validity evidence in terms of content, response process, and internal structure that supported the validity of MeRS in the measurement of resilience domains among medical professionals.