By Missi Patterson

Welcome to the FCTL Faculty Forum! This is the first post in what we hope will be a blog that is dedicated to sharing of best practices between faculty members at ACC. As our first foray into what is being called “Pajama Professional Development,” this blog aims to connect faculty colleagues by giving them a place to share what is working for them in the classroom and beyond.

You can create posts about anything that you think facilitates academic success at ACC. Share your successes, your favorite teaching tips, resources that you find valuable, or things you’ve learned through participating in development opportunities or conferences. Submit your blog post here: https://docs.google.com/a/austincc.edu/forms/d/1n7Q6hbQgsnHtEAYqSSafqSQP_cvXrzL9wUVEQo1x7Ps/viewform?pli=1

Since I’m launching this new endeavor, I thought I’d share one of my favorite after-exam activities. I believe strongly that exams improve learning, and that they aren’t just for assessment. With that in mind, I have a structured set of collaborative interactions designed to get students to focus on the learning that takes place AFTER tests.

Once I hand back the exam, I select the five most commonly missed questions for that particular class. I divide the students into random groups, and give each group a handout to guide their exam review. All of the students are asked to work together to fashion a spectacular answer for each previously missed question. They are allowed to use their notes, but I’m also on hand walking between groups, ready to help folks who are struggling to come up with a good response.

After this, for each commonly missed question, I ask them to find at least one person in the group who was successful with the material. The group is prompted to ask that individual what they did when they were studying for that topic. The students are guided to share at least one successful study technique for each missed question. If no one was successful for a particular question, the group is allowed to ask me or another group for study tips.

Once the groups have completed these steps for all the commonly missed questions, they are asked to work together to create a multiple choice question covering the material from one of the selected items. They must come up with a good, application-based question along with one correct answer, and three distractors. Finally, they are asked to explain WHY the answers are either correct or distractors. Students are then invited to the board to share their group’s sample question. We work as a class to answer them, and I promise the students to use at least one of these student-generated questions on the final exam.

This work can all be done in under 30 minutes, and at the end of the experience, students have several plans of how to attack future material, they have reflected on challenging class material, and they have practiced an incredibly valuable study technique: writing their own exam questions. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, and to learn what things YOU find helpful in your classrooms!