Adapting Public Exams for Introductory Physics: A Mixed-Methods Investigation of Student Outcomes
Public Exams are an assessment system designed in the context of Biology Education Research to increase student engagement in the exam design process. Students are shown incomplete versions of test questions ahead of time, with the format of the question revealed but some details withheld. Students are also given the chance to provide feedback on the questions, refining them for clarity before the actual exam. In this study, we examined the impact of Public Exams on the experiences and outcomes of N = 42 students in an introductory physics course at New Mexico State University. Using a combination of online numerical surveys, open-ended written responses, and student grade data, we conducted a mixed-methods analysis of the impact of Public Exams on students in this class. We also applied our method to re-analyze the publicly available data of Wiggins et al. Students reported various benefits of Public Exams, including reduced test anxiety and directing to core concepts, and we observed a significant positive correlation between the participation rate of students in editing public exam questions and their average exam grade. But students also expressed dissatisfaction with the incomplete information provided on problems, and they had a less positive response rate than the control sample. In other qualitative responses, students also consistently highlighted the applications of procedural knowledge as most helpful to their learning and a recommendation for the future. Our findings suggest that physics students at NMSU do benefit from Public Exams through reduced anxiety and directing to core concepts, but that the Public Exam system, as previously described, is not optimized for use in physics. We attribute this to the particular emphasis in physics on applying procedural knowledge and suggest modifications of the Public Exam system to better tailor it to a physics context.