How Learning Works

APPENDIX F What Are Exam Wrappers and How Can We Use Them?

All too often when students receive back a graded exam, they focus on a single feature—the score they earned. Although this focus on “the grade” is understandable, it can lead students to miss out on several learning opportunities that such an assessment can provide:

• Identifying their own individual areas of strength and weakness to guide further study
• Reflecting on the adequacy of their preparation time and the appropriateness of their study strategies
• Characterizing the nature of their errors to find any recurring patterns that could be addressed

So to encourage students to process their graded exams more deeply, instructors can use exam wrappers, short handouts that students complete ...