Exam Wrappers involve students undertaking a guided reflection about the result and feedback that they received for an assessment, and the approach that they took to the assessment, to help them prepare more effectively for future assessments.
Instructions
- After the results of an assessment have been made available, provide students with some questions to guide them to reflect on their approach and the result.
- Give students time to individually reflect on their assessment experience, answering the questions provided. Encourage them to be honest and thoughtful in their responses.
- Collect the completed exam wrappers from each student if you plan to review them individually or provide feedback. Alternatively, you can ask students to keep them.
Tips
Although this activity is known as “exam wrappers”, it need not be limited just to exams – it would be a useful activity following any assessment.
Tailor the guiding questions to the course/assessment at hand. Some general questions could be about how much time the student put into preparing, what they did to prepare, what went well (and why), what went poorly (and why), and what they will do differently next time.
Resources
Exam wrapper questions
Variations
- Make it a group discussion: Depending on your class size and dynamics, you could include a class discussion after the individual reflection. Students can share insights, challenges and strategies.
- Turn it into a resource: Have students reflect on the most useful thing and the least useful thing they did to prepare for the assessment and note it down. Have students anonymously share their answers (e.g. on a Miro board, or on sticky notes stuck on a wall of the class – the educator would then take a photo or write up the notes and share them). Students can then return to this resource when they’re feeling stuck about what to do to prepare for an assessment.
References
Exam Wrappers – Eberly Center – Carnegie Mellon University (cmu.edu)