Quizzes and Exams

Reduce Exam Anxiety

A Strategy for Reducing Exam Anxiety

It’s an expressive writing activity, and it couldn’t be much simpler or more straightforward. Before students start an exam, on a sheet fastened to the front of it, they spend five minutes (or some other designated time period) writing about their thoughts and feelings regarding

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Retrieval Cues on Tests

Using Retrieval Cues on Tests

Tests cause most students considerable anxiety. That’s good, because it usually motivates them to study. However, when it’s time to take the exam, excessive anxiety can compromise how students perform. They miss questions that they knew the answer to, or so they tell us. We

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quizzes and exams

A Quiz or the Hat Trick?

It’s a choice Susan Taft gives her MBA students. The class can choose to take a written quiz at the beginning of every class session (they meet once a week) or they can participate in an oral activity she’s dubbed the hat trick. Here’s how

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Grading

Three Big Questions to Ask about Grading

They’re questions that grew out of theology professor Barbara Blodgett’s move to a new grading system. They’re questions that poke at the premises beneath grading and they’re relevant regardless of the grading system used. They’re not questions with easy answers but rather vexing queries with

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When a Student Disagrees with the Grade

When a Student Disagrees with the Grade

“This is not a C paper!”  “This answer deserves more points.”  “Half of my work on this problem is correct, but I got less than half credit.”  Grades are terribly important to most students, so when they object to a grade, they often do so

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Study for the Exam

How Should I Study for the Exam?

It’s a question on every student’s mind, especially those just starting their college careers. Sometimes they ask other students, peers they know and can speak to without feeling foolish. Rarely do they ask the teacher, but they occasionally ask a tutor or other learning professional.

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group exams

Group Exams and Quizzes: Design Options to Consider

Although still not at all that widely used, there’s long-standing interest in letting students work together on quizzes or exams. Upon first hearing about the approach, teachers’ initial response is almost always negative. Here are the most common objections.

  • Grades are measures of individual mastery of
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Oral Exams

A New Approach to Oral Exams

As professors, we have all been there—trying to decide the best way to assess students to determine whether learning has taken place. The goal of education is, after all, to get the information into the student’s long-term memory so that he or she can draw

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college student studying

Ten Study Strategies for Students and Their Teachers

Here’s one of those articles that really shouldn’t be missed, particularly for those with interest in making teaching and learning more evidence-based. Current thinking about evidence-based teaching and learning tends to be more generic than specific. Use any active learning strategy intermittently or even regularly,

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Tackling Testing Anxiety

Tackling Testing Anxiety

Most entry-level science classes are test-centric, meaning that the course grade is based primarily on tests and only minimally on homework, quizzes, or other grades. For students with test anxiety, that can be devastating.

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