Dear colleague,
Short note today, but when I saw this (image below), I thought of you. Test corrections, to me, are a critical part of the learning process. They allow students to Unpack Outcomes, Good or Bad (Strategy #9 in The Will to Learn), and they imply that tests are just another part of the learning process, not the learning process' end.
That said, test corrections can easily become just another kind of busywork for students and another checkbox to mindlessly tick. To help with this, I try to point my students toward the critical role of knowledge-building, and I tell them that if they're looking at a missed question and can identify a word they didn't know, that's a great angle to take for that correction.
Just sharing in case it spurs on your thinking. And note that there are more sophisticated means for doing test corrections — e.g., exam wrappers — and I recommend experimenting with those, too.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
P.S. I can't imagine teaching without a solid grasp of how learning works. It's so important to me, in fact, that I created an in-depth course about it called Principles of Learning.
- Group license are available by request — just reach out.
- Individual licenses are $199 and can be purchased here.
P.P.S. Here's another example where the student is purely focused on vocab acquisition. It's not perfect work, but it's an example of what we're after: intentional use of classroom routines (e.g., test corrections) for the purpose of building knowledge (Chapter 3 of These 6 Things).
Leave a Reply