Assessment of Scientific thinking in Basic Science Questions in the Iranian Fourth National Olympiad for Medical Sciences Students

Introduction: Regarding to the importance of students Olympiads, and the need for evaluation of quality of questions, the aim of this study was to analyze questions (indices of difficulty coefficient and discrimination coefficient) of Fourth Olympiad examination among Iranian medical sciences students in the area of scientific thinking in basic science. Methods: This study was descriptive-analytical study and was conducted in 2013 in the Tabriz University of Medical Sciences (Tabriz, Iran). The individual phase of this period, comprised from four phase and six parts included: designing conceptual map (CM) (three part designing CM, summarizing CM, and designing three questions), hypothesis generating, selecting variables, and analyzing the findings. Data analyzed using descriptive statistics and statistical tests in SPSS for Windows. Results: According to difficulty coefficient of selecting variable (82%) and making hypothesis was the easiest part (46%). And according to discriminate coefficient, analyzing the findings had the highest discriminate coefficient (83%), and selecting materials had the lowest discriminate coefficient (34%). Difficulty coefficient of the test was estimated about 63%, and discriminate coefficient was 66%. The results of Spearman correlation coefficient test showed that the correlation between scores related to designing CM with generating hypothesis equals to 85%, with selecting variable was 36% and with analyzing the results equals to 71%.Conclusion: Based on the result of this study, it is necessary for a designer of test to focus on selecting variable part of the test for improvement of quality and validity of the test. Furthermore, regarding to effectiveness of CM, it seems logical to pay more attention to their use