You’re reading the latest issue of Teaching, a weekly newsletter from a team of Chronicle journalists. Sign up here to get it in your inbox on Thursdays.
This week:
- I describe how three professors use exam reviews to improve students’ metacognitive skills.
- I share some interesting news articles and opinion pieces you may have missed.
Making the Most of Test Review
Laura Wheeler Poms teaches epidemiology, a math-intensive course that has proved challenging for a lot of her public-health students at George Mason University, in Virginia. So three years ago she introduced a test-reflection exercise after the first exam, a make-or-break moment for many students since the concepts tested set the stage for the rest of the course.
After she graded and returned her students’ tests, Poms wanted them to pause and reflect, not just on what they had gotten wrong, but why. And she wanted them to better understand how their study techniques may have contributed to those mistakes.
Learning how to learn is one of those much-talked-about ideas in education that is often tricky to put into practice. You can tell students that rereading chapters and cramming the night before a test don’t effectively help them understand ideas or strengthen analytical skills. But for Poms, and a couple of other professors I talked to, it’s not until students walk through examples of their own learning that those messages start to resonate.
Poms, George Mason’s undergraduate program director in global and community health, has found her post-exam review session valuable in showing students their gaps in understanding and providing them with concrete strategies for learning. That helps them get unstuck from bad study habits.
“We all do it,” she says. “We rely on what worked for us before — and when it doesn’t, we’re not quite sure what to do.”
I heard a lot about the concept of test reflection — also called a post-exam review or, most colorfully, a test autopsy — at the annual Teaching Professor conference. Several sessions were devoted to the topic. So I tracked down the speakers and asked them about how they put the idea into practice, the research behind it, and what results they’ve seen.
So far Poms has done a test reflection only after the first of three exams, she says, because it is so time consuming. But that’s often enough to spark change.
She hands out a four-part form. In the first section, students are asked how much time they spent studying, and what percentage of it was done alone versus in a group. They’re also asked what percentage of time they spent on particular study techniques. She provides a list of options, including rereading the textbook or class notes, memorizing, flash cards, creating analogies, and interleaving, which means the varying of study habits. Many students rely on just a few techniques, but the reflection gives her an opportunity to explain why some techniques work better than others.
During class, she gives examples of how to incorporate different techniques. One student, for example, said she couldn’t participate in group study because she has children. Poms suggested she develop flash cards and ask her kids to quiz her.
Another section of the reflection form asks students to figure out why they got certain answers wrong. Was it a math error, a careless mistake, a lack of preparation? Did they have trouble understanding the concepts or remembering definitions? Different reasons require different study habits.
Poms also asks them to name two things they will do differently in preparation for the next test. It has to be specific, she says, since the default is often: “I will study harder.”
Finally, she asks them to suggest how she can improve her teaching.
Those approaches to encouraging metacognition are common in test-review sessions, other professors told me. Talk to students about both study strategies and knowledge gaps, they said. Ask students to think about what they can do differently next time. And look for ways to improve your teaching.
Cathy Box, director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Lubbock Christian University, is a passionate advocate for teaching students metacognitive skills. She goes as far as to call it a moral obligation. Jobs and technology are changing too fast to simply teach content. Instead, she argues, students must be taught how they can learn so they can adapt to the changing workplace.
At Lubbock Christian, in Texas, students may be exposed repeatedly to the concept of learning how to learn. They hear about it in a freshman seminar, and professors sometimes talk about it within their discipline. Box introduces metacognition strategies to faculty members during a three-semester learning academy in which they read books such as Creating Self-Regulated Learners.
“The professors find that the more times they do it in their own classes,” Box says, “it gets stronger and more powerful.” Initially students might think it’s “a dumb thing,” she says: “‘Just tell me what I need to do to get a 100.’” But “by the end of the semester they really do see the power of setting goals.”
Box teaches faculty members other strategies to bolster students’ self-awareness of their learning habits. One way is to show them examples of good and bad work, hand them a rubric, and have them score both. Similarly, a professor could demonstrate how to work through a problem the right way and the wrong way, then ask students to review them and find the errors.
Poms says she has seen a reduction in the number of D’s, F’s, and withdrawals in her epidemiology course, a rise in the number of students who come to office hours, and an increase in self-efficacy — a belief in one’s ability to succeed — among her students. She notes, though, that she has made other changes in her teaching as well, to introduce more active-learning strategies.
Have you incorporated metacognitive strategies into your teaching, to help your students become more aware of how they learn and to improve their study habits? If so I’d like to hear about how you structured the review and what you learned from it. Email me, at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com. Your story may appear in a future issue of the newsletter.
