Group work is an important part of active learning. Group work is starting to be used on exams and we used something similar to Ref: [Meyer2016]. So after seven years of teaching I finally think I have honed in on the best way to do the first exam in Physics 1.
- 5 minutes to silently review exam (without pencils)
- 10-15 minutes to work in groups (without pencils)
- unlimited time to work on the problems on the exam silently by themselves with pencils, pens, etc
- An equation sheet is allowed
- No calculators
- Lots of graphing
- MATLAB code to review of course!
- Messy problems students have to sort through
- Start at night (8pm – 11pm)* (*I always give a second option for those who can’t make the evening.)
- Some kind of metacogitation exercise after the fact with an opportunity to earn more exam points through extra credit
It is important realize that this doesn’t work for everyone. At least one student left the exam super stressed. However, that is typical for one’s first physics exam in college. It seemed as if people were happier. NOW I am not a physics education expert so I can’t figure out how to measure anything scientifically in this context (I have a stack of rejected physics education papers to confirm this) – so if you are interested and know how to do this I would be happy to collaborate.
The students really bought in to it as well. That made it fun. When I walked into the room, the entire class erupted in cheering. We did a new year’s countdown (10…9…8…) to start the exam. And once group work started it was insane. Listen to the NOISE here! Next year, I am going to have to bring the noise down a little bit.
The grading starts soon. 🙁
An example of an exam is below:
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