Group Studying the Final

Just under three weeks until final exams. Some of my conscientious plan-ahead students have stopped by my office to discuss if they are adequately preparing for the final exam. My course web pages in general chemistry contain an extensive “How to Learn the Material” section. It covers time management, pre-reading, post-reading, how to approach homework, how to approach exams, keeping up with the material, etc. (The conscientious students already know these things.) One thing it doesn’t do is discuss group brainstorming for the final exam.

In many countries, including where I grew up (not in the U.S.), the education system features culminating high-stakes national exams. These are designed to test the student’s knowledge base over several years’ worth of material, in all subjects, usually crammed into a week or two. Needless to say, it is extremely high stress compared to here in the U.S. Perhaps not surprisingly, one strategy we used as students was to get together and try to predict the most likely topics or types of questions we might be asked on the national exams.

I had forgotten that strategy – it’s been a long time since I’ve used it. Over the summer, when I read about the Treisman studies (in Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi), I started to ponder the effects of group-study-workshops. In short, Treisman, a math professor, followed his students around to observe where students studied, with whom (or alone), how they studied, when they studied, etc. For some groups, “Saturday night studying in the library counted as social life… in part, over studying and doing math problems together.” Essentially the academic and social lives blurred. Treisman set up workshops where students worked on challenging math problems together. Participating students, who had previously worked and struggled alone, started to improve their calculus grades significantly.

No, I haven’t set up any chemistry sessions in a similar vein. Not yet, at least. But I’ve been turning the idea over in my mind all semester long. (Really, I should get together with a group and hash out this idea!) That’s what reminded me of my group strategy long ago when approaching high stakes end-of-year exams. I did not originate the idea – this was par for the course (pun intended); students had been doing it for years and the lore was passed down.

Anyway, I started telling my students that after they’ve put in the individual work to prepare for the final exam, they should consider get together with their like-minded classmates to hash out what might be important, what might be asked on the final exam, and how to better prepare for the exam as part of a group consensus. The important caveat, I stressed, was that for it to work well, they had to have individually studied up ahead of time. If an unprepared group of students came together, there would just be hot-air speculation, unlikely to be actually useful to anyone.

In a sense, I’ve sort-of done this for the take-home midterm exams in my general chemistry class this year. After studying and taking the exam alone closed-book in the allotted time-frame, my students are encouraged to look up answers, get together with their classmates, and then annotate their exams (in a different color) before turning them in. I pitched this as good preparation for the final exam. I didn’t enforce working together in groups – I’m guessing some did and some did not. Perhaps I should ask, and then check if the responses correlate to subsequent performance on the final exam. My mind is now starting to swirl with how to design a simple self-assessment that will help me tease out the various (possible) factors. I feel like I’m becoming a social scientist! It might help me figure out how to help students set up their own ‘working groups’ that would be productive.