Research School Network: Using exam wrappers to encourage Year 11 students to reflect on the effectiveness of their revision How exam wrappers can be a valuable source of student feedback and reflection

Prompting student reflection on revision

Last October, my Year 11 GCSE Chemistry class sat their first mock exams. When marking their papers, I noticed clear differences in the students’ ability to answer the questions successfully by hitting the points on the mark scheme. I know from experience that the students who are the most successful in their exams are able to choose and deploy effective revision techniques at home and are excellent at self-directing their learning. I wondered, how can I encourage students to be reflective about the revision techniques they use, and how can their reflections feed into the revision homework tasks I set?

The EEF Guidance Report on Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning is an excellent starting point to explore this. Recommendation 6 from the Guidance Report states, ​“Explicitly Teach pupils to organise, and effectively manage, their learning independently”. Reading the opening vignette of this recommendation, it is clear that Nathan has it nailed!

Flashcards

Students in Year 11 at my school have been taught how to use flashcards as part of our tutorial program. Dunlosky et al.(2013) found that Practice testing and Distributed (‘spaced’) practice have high utility as learning techniques. The revision activity I set for students as homework in the lead up to their mock exam was to revise a topic a week, by producing a set of flashcards on key chemistry content, and to use these to test themselves throughout the week. I thought that students would find this useful as this helped them recap their knowledge weekly, in small chunks, and because it was a strategy they were already confident with. Most students got on board with this revision activity and were completing the task every week.

Exam wrappers as a source of student feedback

Once I’d marked their exams I decided to develop and use an online exam wrapper. This is a technique suggested in Recommendation 6 of the Guidance Report and examples can be found here: Exam Wrappers – Eberly Center – Carnegie Mellon University. The guidance report states that:

​“Teaching tools like ​‘exam wrappers’ (a post-exam student self-evaluation feedback tool) offer teachers and pupils a way to evaluate and analyse errors, and revision patterns, for a given exam. This can help improve pupils’ accuracy of judgement.”

I made my own exam wrapper using Microsoft Forms and set it as a home learning task for students to complete. The feedback I received was really insightful.

It helped me gain knowledge of student’s perceptions of how worthwhile they found the revision tasks I had set for them weekly. I asked was ​“How effective do you think your revision (making and using flashcards) was at helping you prepare for your Chemistry mock exam?” and 88% of my class felt that their revision was ​“Very” or ​“Somewhat Effective”. Positive, right?

But when asked a follow up question of why students thought this, these responses stood out:

• I think it helped with vague understanding and doing past paper questions would have been more effective
• Flashcards are only useful when you fully understand the topic and can help you consolidate it. 
• I memorised the information but did not know how to actually apply it.
• Revision cards are effective as they help me recall information but for chemistry, 
• I think I should revise using practice questions as that is how I will be tested in the exam.

I’ve always valued student feedback, and using an exam wrapper was a great opportunity to collect this. So how will this student feedback influence future revision homework tasks I set for them? I’ve learnt that the students find making and using flashcards to test their knowledge useful, but I now need to start setting exam practice questions for students to complete following or alongside their flashcard work. This isn’t really a surprise to me, but it’s something I clearly overlooked in helping students to prepare for their first mock!

Resources

Examples of exam wrappers from Carnegie Mellon University: https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/d…

EEF Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning guidance report

Reference

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J. and Willingham, D. T. (2013) ​‘Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology’, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14 (1), pp. 4 – 58