Students reflecting on their learning

In order to take the emphasis off of the final mark on the unit test, my colleagues and I decided to try something new in our last grade 9 unit. We were going to have the students reflect on their learning before seeing their final grade on the test.

The day the students wrote the test, we photocopied their completed test before grading it. On Friday, students were provided with the photocopy of their own test and a sheet that looked like this:

They then spent the class time working through each question identifying what content of the unit was assessed in that question along with a reflection of how prepared they felt for the question. 

At the end of the period, students were provided with their graded test. 

Some of my take aways from the activity:

-  Students focused more on their own solutions and not just the number of marks they got. Often students who do well on the test only focus on the few questions that contain mistakes and do not take the time to reflect on what they also did well. 

- The conversations between students were focused on learning and not just on marks. If two students got different answers, they worked together to determine where the mistakes arose.

- When the marked tests were returned, there were no surprises or emotional responses to lower than expected marks. And as mentioned above, the students who did well looked through their test with a critical eye as opposed to seeing a good mark and filing it away in their binders. 

I'll admit that this was in reaction to students writing the test and identifying that they felt it was a challenging test. In the future, it would be beneficial to have students go through this reflection activity before the test (even before the review period) so that they can focus their studying on the content of the unit where they feel least prepared. It is definitely something that I would consider doing before the final exam. 

Finally, we did have the benefit of having time to use a class to go through this process. In other units, I hope to use this same reflection activity but may have to assign it for homework the day before I return the test. I could envision students going through this process at home and arriving to class with an educated guess as to how they think they did on the test.