Using exam wrappers to expose students to learning research changes study strategies

Students enter college science and math programs with disparate and unequal high school experiences. They vary not only in foundational knowledge but also in the metacognitive behaviors related to success: self-regulation, persistence, and self-efficacy (NAS 2017). Self-regulation and persistence can manifest in the strategies students adopt when preparing for exams. The majority of students tend to use re-reading (Karpicke, Butler & Roediger 2009), which has been demonstrated to be less effective than active learning strategies such as forced recall (e.g. Smith, Floerke & Thomas 2016). However, college STEM faculty rarely make time to guide students' development of more appropriate study strategies. Faculty do commonly employ post-exam wrappers to encourage student reflection, but the impact on metacognition is controversial (e.g. Gizem Gezer-Templeton et al. 2017 versus Soicher & Gurung 2016). We enhanced mid-semester exam wrappers by requiring readings of brief on-line blogs about learning. Our evaluation question is: does exposing students to information about the efficacy of different study strategies change their habits?

Students completed on-line surveys as wrappers for five exams, with the exposure to research presented at the Learning Scientists website occurring with the third and forth wrappers. The second and fifth wrappers collected pre/post-exposure data about study strategies, asking students to rank-order their study strategies then reflect on their choices. A total of 79 of 83 students completed at least one wrapper and 66 did the fifth wrapper. Among those, 57 did both the pre- and post-exposure wrappers and 55 completed one or both of the Learning scientist wrappers. Preliminary analysis indicates a marked decline in the proportion of students who use 'rereading' as their primary or secondary study strategy (from 77% to 46%). Our poster contextualizes these results through reflections by the student co-author and qualitative analysis of students' reflections on their changing strategies.