Exam Wrappers and Metacognition

Defining Exam Wrappers

Exam wrappers are short pre- and/or post-exam assignments that ask students to think through their exam performance and preparation. Rather than focusing on the course material, an exam wrapper is a chance to critically think about what students did to study and how they performed. 

They can be as simple as asking students to review missed material - communicating that exams are not the end of learning - or they can be a whole class period devoted to better study habits for the next exam. 

 

Defining Metacognition

The most important aspect of exam wrappers is metacognition.

Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one’s thinking.  More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding and performance. Metacognition includes a critical awareness of a) one’s thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and learner.

“Metacognition Links to an external site.,” Nancy Chick, Vanderbilt University, Center for Teaching

Metacognition is not just about the subject matter. It is higher-order thinking about how learning works in all subjects. It is difficult for many students, often because they are not encouraged or trained to be good metacognitive thinkers. They study for an exam, then forget that information. They take class after class, but fail to make connections between classes. 

But, if we want students to be prepared for the workplace, we need to teach metacognition explicitly. We need to develop the skills that metacognition encourages, including:

  • self regulation, or "the ability to orchestrate one's learning: to plan, monitor success, and correct errors when appropriate" (Bowen)
  • awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses, including learning blind spots
  • transfer of skills and knowledge from one discipline or course to another

 

Reading Toolboxes

For example, if students just read their Biology textbook the exact same way that they read a novel for their English Literature course, they are not using the right tools. Students who are aware that Biology and Literature are different disciplines and require different approaches to reading and class preparation will be better equipped to learn from their reading more efficiently - they will have different tools in their reading toolboxes. When students are aware that different different reading situations require different strategies (including what active reading looks like, how quickly they should read the material,  and what effective reading looks like), they can CHOOSE the right strategy for the right situation. Meta-reading skills are essential for success. And, meta-test taking skills are also necessary.

 

Metacognition and Student Success

When students lack metacognitive awareness, they often attribute success or failure to external factors beyond their control, like whether or not inspiration struck, whether or not the teacher liked or disliked them personally, whether it rained or snowed outside... The more than students are able to attribute their exam performances to their own preparation, the better they are able to grow in confidence that what they are doing is working and transfer the effective behaviors to other learning situations. 

One last idea: this type of thinking cannot be taught only once.  Exam awareness and metacognitive skills are best learned in specific contexts.

Note that metacognition is a complex set of skills including self-awareness (knowing your strengths and weaknesses), understanding learning goals, planning an approach to learning, monitoring, evaluating performance, reflecting and adjusting. Metacognition (like critical thinking) is often discipline specific and is best learned with subject content: generic study skills courses have not proven effective. Repeated exposure to transparently announced and labeled critical thinking in different contexts, however, greatly helps students to create more transferrable thinking skills.

Cognitive Wrappers: Using Metacognition and Reflection to Improve Learning Links to an external site., Jose Antonio Bowen, Teaching Naked 2013

We can't just assume that their first-quarter College Success course  or high school classes helped students learn to be critical  thinkers for our classes. We have to explicitly teach their skills within our own disciplinary contexts, and we have to repeatedly teach these skills.

 

Challenges

With all the benefits mentioned above, there are also challenges to teaching metacognition. First, it takes time. We all have significant course material to cover in a short amount of time. Of course, if we don't emphasize metacognition, students don't retain or transfer that knowledge, so it is counterproductive to move through course material quickly or incompletely.  Also, metacognition is not the traditional appraoch, so students sometimes resist learning or feel like the assignments are busy work. Reflection is difficult to teach well, and most of those skills are outside the training of many faculty. Finally, we may get inauthentic answers to our questions. Students know what we want to hear (or, at least, what they think we want to hear). And sometimes, they give it to us without any signficant thought or effort. 

These are certainly significant challenges, but they are not good enough reasons to skip emphasizing metacognition in our classes. 

 

Resources

There are a lot of both research studies on the topic as well as practical applications of the evidence in college classrooms.  Here are some places to start:

Samples:

Research and Theory: