Frequent mastery testing with second‐chance exams leads to enhanced student learning in undergraduate engineering

The effect of exam retakes on future exam performance in a large classroom setting

Assessing student mastery is often done by using exams. Inevitably, some students will complete remediation, which may include exam retakes. This method provides students an additional opportunity to take an exam that assesses the same objectives as the original exam, while using different questions. Although this form of remediation increases exam scores, it is also possible that students who prepare for an exam retake adversely affect preparation for an upcoming exam. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine whether studying for and taking an exam retake affected preparation for the next exam. We hypothesized that students who completed an exam retake would have lower than expected scores on their next exam. This study utilized data collected over five semesters from 467 students enrolled in a 200-level introductory human physiology class; 159 students (34.0%) completed at least one exam retake. Students who retook an exam increased their original exam score by 6.1% (SD 13.9). These findings suggest that retaking an exam leads to better outcomes, which could be explained by students improving their study habits or test-taking skills, which would help them perform better on future exams.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Exam retakes provide students with an additional opportunity to demonstrate mastery of learning objectives. However, this preparation might adversely affect performance on subsequent exams. This study suggests that students who choose to prepare for and take an exam retake not only improve their original exam score but show a larger improvement on subsequent exam performance than those students who did not take an exam retake.

Implementing a Specifications Grading System in a Nursing Course

BACKGROUND

Nurse educators are charged with the challenging task of evaluating student learning and abilities effectively using traditional student assessment methods, which come with several inherent shortcomings. New guidelines for nurse educators now present a more competency-based approach to nursing education that calls for objective-driven assessments.

PROBLEM

Traditional grading practices lack the ability to connect student learning to their final course grades. However, specifications grading, which directly links grades to learning objectives, has not been not adequately explored in the nursing literature.

APPROACH

A specifications grading system was designed and implemented in an online undergraduate nursing research course. Student and faculty feedback on the system were reviewed.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, students and faculty approved of the specifications grading system. Recommendations are presented for adopting specifications grading in nursing courses. Research is needed to explore student perceptions of the grading system and its effects on student learning and performance.