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Turning exams into a learning experience

Published: 10 March 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Most students see exams as a stressful experience, having crammed as much as they possibly can and hoping that the material they have studied would indeed be on the exams, and the material that they did not have the time to study for, nor understand, would be overlooked by their professors. At the same time, instructors see exams as formal assessments of student learning. Exams are seldom thought of as a learning experience. In this paper, we report our experiences in the use of two-stage exams as a learning experience for the students in two different courses. In a two-stage exam, students write an exam individually, then they rewrite the same exam in collaboration with three or four other students. One of the main objectives is to encourage peer instruction and promote learning even during the exams. Students obtain immediate feedback during the exam, and initial results have shown that this type of exam format produces some positive effects in later assessment.

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Black, P. & William, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning, Assessment in Education, vol. 5, no. 1, pp 7--74.
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Computer Science Curriculum 2008: An Interim Revision of CS 2001. (December 2008). Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved on September 7, 2009 from http://www.acm.org//education/curricula/ComputerScience2008.pdf.
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Gibbs, G. & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students' Learning, Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, Issue 1, pp. 3 -- 31.
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Hatte, J.A. (1987). Identifying the salient facets of a model of student learning: a synthesis of meta--analyses, International Journal of Educational Research, vol. 11, pp. 187--212.
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Heller, P., Keith, R., Anderson, S. (July 1992). Teaching Problem Solving Through Cooperative Grouping. Part 1: Group versus Individual Problem Solving. American Association of Physics Teachers. 60(7). pp 627 -- 636.
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Heller, P., Hollabaugh, M. (July 1992). Teaching Problem Solving Through Cooperative Group. Part 2. Designing Problems and Structuring Groups. American Association of Physics Teachers. 60(7). pp 637 -- 644.
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Schwartz, D. L. (1999). The productive agency that drives collaborative learning. Collaborative Learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches, pp. 197--218.
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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '10: Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
March 2010
618 pages
ISBN:9781450300063
DOI:10.1145/1734263
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 10 March 2010

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Author Tags

  1. assessment
  2. learning
  3. midterms
  4. peer-instruction
  5. two-stage exams

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