Exam Wrappers: Empowering Student Reflection

EXAM WRAPPERS: EMPOWERING STUDENT REFLECTION

Student sitting with a laptop surrounded by icons representing learning such as light bulb, apple, questions mark, and magnifying lens. We use exams for assessment, but they can also be an important opportunity for learning. Although we hope that students will learn material prior to the exam, we still have the opportunity to create learning experiences following the exam. Most students are eager to leave an exam behind, but we can encourage them to not only actively engage with the material and reinforce course content, but use metacognition (thinking about how they learn) to improve performance on future exams. Exam wrappers are an easy way to allow for reflection and learning without requiring any investment of valuable class time. Here we focus on exams, but these cognitive wrappers can also be used for many types of assignments.

On this page, we will cover:

  1. What is an Exam Wrapper?
  2. When to Use Exam Wrappers
  3. How to Use Exam Wrappers
  4. Why Use Exam Wrappers?
  5. Additional Resources
  6. References

 

What is an exam wrapper?

Exam wrappers can take many forms, but essentially they are any activity that directs students to review their own performance and the instructor feedback on the assignment with the goal of learning content and adapting their future learning strategies (Lovett 2013). Exam wrappers typically use three questions for students to reflect upon after receiving feedback from the instructor on the assignment:

  1. How did you prepare for the exam?
    • How much time did you spend studying? Was it enough time?
    • What type of activities or strategies did you use to study? Were they effective?

  2. What kind of errors did you make on the assignment?
    • Were they simple or minor errors (e.g., miscalculations, misspellings, etc.)?
    • Did you read the question or prompt carefully? Did you understand it?
    • Did you understand the basic concept behind each question? Were there topics covered that were unexpected?
  3. What would you do differently next time?
    • Do you need to double-check your work to fix simple errors?
    • Do you need to change the topics you are focusing on?
    • Do you need different study strategies to learn the material on the exam?

 

When to use exam wrappers

Exam wrappers may be most effective after the first exam. When receiving grades that are lower than they expected, students often resolve to study harder. We would like to encourage students to study better, rather than harder. Student anxiety about their performance in the class may be highest shortly after the exam, which can provide motivation for those students looking to make a change in their study habits. After the first exam, students may be concerned that they thought they were studying effectively and despite much effort, their grade does not reflect their effort. Exam wrappers can help focus that anxiety in a productive way.

 

How to use exam wrappers

Exam wrappers can be done inside or outside a class. Assigning exam wrappers outside of class may provide students more time to reflect. Providing some points for completing the exam wrapper may encourage students to do so. Just because students need to turn it in does not mean that the assignment needs to be graded, though there may be valuable information for the instructor about how students are preparing for exams. For example, are they engaging actively with understanding concepts or spending more time memorizing? The goal is for students to reflect, rather than receive feedback about their own individual study habits, but some general advice about effective strategies would help all students. Sometime before the second exam, return the exam wrappers to students to remind them of their self-reflection and their plans to do something differently next time. Optionally, you could ask students to share their approaches to learning with one another.

 

Why use exam wrappers?

  • Exam wrappers require very little class time and can be assigned as homework.
  • They require minimal time investment from students, as the assignment should be less than 1 page long.
  • They can be adapted to different types of classes. Study strategies in introductory-level courses are different from those in graduate-level courses, and students are constantly learning how to best process information at increasingly higher levels.
  • Exam wrappers help students use metacognition to increase their performance on exams in this class and in their other classes. 
  • Metacognition allows students to understand how learning works best for them, which study strategies best lead to learning, and whether they need to make adjustments. 

 

Additional Resources

 

References

Lovett, M. C. (2013). Make exams worth more than the grade. Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning. In M. Kaplan (Ed.), Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy (pp. 18-52). Stylus Publishing.