Essay Roulette: Reducing Students' Exam Anxiety and Increasing Self-Accountability
Keywords:
assessment, exam anxiety, biology undergraduate education, constructed response examAbstract
Creating summative assessments that accurately test students' breadth of knowledge and critical thinking can be a difficult task. Instructors often rely upon overly complex quick response questions or constructed response exams. However, students often have negative perceptions of the latter. The authors implemented an approach for administering constructed response exams called "Essay Roulette" in which students were given essay prompts a week prior to the exam, and the actual exam questions were chosen by the roll of a die. Students reported increased motivation, a reduction in stress, and saw improvement on their essay performance.
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