In a recently published article, the authors took exam wrappers one step further and sent students to our blog to learn more about retrieval practice and metacognition in particular and to see how that would impact students’ strategy choices (2).
We know that left to their own devices students most often choose less than desirable strategies, like re-reading instead of retrieval (3). There are a lot of reasons why this might be the case, including lack of awareness, the fact that those strategies “have always worked in the past”, the immediate feeling of ease that comes from strategies like re-reading, etc. Regardless, it’s possible that a little “show and tell” could be enough to convince students that strategies like re-reading are simply not working very well for them.
In this study, the researchers looked at exams in a college-level introductory biology course in which students took several exams. Students could gain extra credit for completing exam wrappers after four of the exams in the course. On the first and last exam wrappers, students were asked to rank order strategies they had used for studying before the exam. On the wrappers in between, students were asked a number of questions, but they were also sent to resources to learn more.
In particular, on the second exam wrapper students were sent to this blog and asked to interpret this image:
