One key premise of this workshop has been that exams can not only assess but also facilitate student learning. Indeed, literature on the "testing effect" makes clear that the very act of taking an exam can solidify learning. This page outlines some strategies you can use to help maximize exams' potential to facilitate student learning before and after the exam itself.

It's important to note that in some fields, the phenomenon of stereotype threat can cause some students to underperform on exams (because of the often-unconscious redirection of cognitive resources to anxiety about confirming a negative stereotype about the abilities of one's identity group in the domain of the exam). The strategies below help mitigate stereotype threat and prepare all students for success on exams by:

• normalizing challenge (i.e., characterizing the significant effort that learning requires as a function of the difficulty of the material, not of the specific attributes of the student),
• communicating a belief that all students can succeed, and
• providing all students clear pathways to success.

(Click here for more strategies for combating stereotype threat in your teaching more generally.)
 

Preparing Students through Practice and Feedback

As we have mentioned a few times, an exam can lack validity if you have not aligned it with your prior instruction or given students ample opportunities to develop the skills you want to assess. The research on how learning works powerfully demonstrates that developing the sorts of complex intellectual skills demanded by college courses requires significant practice and feedback. (See Ambrose et al, Chapters 4-5.) 

RESOURCE: This table identifies and explains a wide range of strategies for providing students practice opportunities and focused feedback on their learning even in very large courses. 
 

Encouraging Effective Study Techniques to Prepare for Exams  

You can support students' success on your exams through guiding them to use the most effective preparation techniques. The chart below summarizes research on the comparative usefulness of a series of common study practices. (Click on the link to the citation for detailed explanations of the studies behind these results.) You can also collect information directly from your students to share with future students by asking them after exams or at the term's end, "What exam preparation techniques were most useful for your learning?" Or "How might you have studied differently for the exams in this course?"

Summarized from Tables 1 and 4 of Dunlosky, J., et al. (2013).

Helping Students Learn from Exam Performance

Much research demonstrates that so-called "metacognitive" practices--i.e., activities that require one to think about one's thinking or learning--can facilitate the process of mastering complex skills and concepts. Metacognition, and specifically reflection about the relation between preparation and performance, can be especially useful for supporting student learning from exams. 

As one way of structuring such metacognitive practice, Marsha Lovett has developed a series of "exam wrappers" that guide students to look beyond simply their score on an exam and consider what their exam performance shows about the effectiveness of their preparation. Upon receiving a graded exam, students answer a series of questions about how they prepared, identify patterns of error or gaps in knowledge, make a plan about how they might prepare differently for the next exam, and identify any ways the teaching team could further support their learning. Responses to these questions are collected and then returned to the individual student when the time comes to prepare for the next exam.  

Here is an example of an exam wrapper from a Physics course. This model could easily be adapated for use in other disciplines, even outside of STEM fields.

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Click to go to the next section: Wrap-up of Step 1