Pedagogical Minute   

A Weekly Service of the College of Arts & Sciences

Finding Out What They Know, and How It Might Differ From What We Teach 

Consider this method of reviewing for at least one exam: two classes before the test, assign the students to comb their notes and memories for test-material: identification items, sight-passages, short answers, essay-prompts – whatever suits your class. On review day, get these suggestions up on the board, and agree that the exam will be built from these suggestions (reserving to yourself of course the right to include items that the students might’ve, mmm, overlooked.  

Agree that the exam will consist of some selection from the agreed-upon material, and that the student who is prepared to respond to all of them items agreed-upon can expect to do well.  

Students will benefit from the simple effort of going over their notes and trying to see what has been foregrounded; they will almost inevitably observe patterns that will help them do more than memorize factoids and datapoints, but fit them into a framework of significance. 

 The exercise can be informative for the instructor – what students think has been most emphasized may not exactly match your own ideas.  

At the theoretical level, the exercise has the value of putting obvious distance between ourselves and a theory of assessment many students suspect we hold: our job as examiners is to conceal from students what we think is important, and to trap them into revealing some crucial ignorance.