I’ve been avoiding exams for a number of years, ever since my research began to involve concept inventories, the development of which explores how well students understand the questions we compose (e.g., papers here beginning ~ 2013). I started to interview students to assess their understanding of test questions, and wow, what a way to surface the disconnect between what we intend to test and how students read questions. If I do give a test, I’m careful to use the same structure of questions that students have practiced in homework and in class. But usually, I’m not testing. Instead, I’m engaging students in the practice of telling and showing me what they’ve learned, sometimes through writing, sometimes through other media they choose.
How fun, then, to connect with colleagues from the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at UW Tacoma who are excellent instructors. Dr. Libi Sundermann and Dr. Jutta Heller shared the kinds of written reflections that they assign to drop the exam. Their talk was in a series about teaching excellence, and UW Tacoma faculty can earn “passport stamps” for coming up with reflective essay prompts that they might use in their own courses. So cool. What might these prompts look like?
Sundermann, a historian, supplements a term-length research paper with a 3-2-1 Weekly Reflection: 3 things I learned, 2 that are interesting and why, and 1 question. The reflection allows students to connect what they’re learning to their lives and other events in the world, and Sundermann finds evidence of deep thinking. The questions students ask can be quite creative, opening up more topics to study. As far as grading and the assessment feedback loop, Sundermann reads through the answers quickly and chooses about one answer a week to discuss as a class or post as an announcement. Rebecca Disrud, Director of the UWT Writing Center, pointed out that this kind of reflection tends to be quite different from what AI can generate specifically because it’s about connections to students’ lives.
Heller, a biologist, talked about the reflections students complete in a 300-level course for biomedical sciences students. She modeled growth beautifully here, discussing different iterations of the prompt. At first, she asked all 35 students to generate a summary of at least one page about what they’d learned that week and how it connects to real life. Like Sundermann, she asks what questions students have, and often these questions influence her class prep for the next week. A particularly nice feature of her assignment is to “Feel free to supplement your written answers with drawings and/or other creative work.” As awesome as these were, grading them was unsustainable. Heller’s now playing with longer reflections fewer times in the quarter. A challenge of teaching science is that students have to learn how to take entrance exams, like the MCAT. Dr. Heller teaches students how to use their reflections to prepare for the MCAT–I found this a particularly noteworthy idea!
I’m preparing a course that’s based on assignments like this, and I’m going to add another step in the process to align this formative assessment with more summative work. While the weekly reflections will be relatively low stakes, the final project will ask students to dive more deeply into a few of their reflections to prepare a portfolio. This gives students ownership about what aspects of the course they want to focus on and the feedback they want to respond to.