Revamp Your Year-end Finals Putting Students FIRST!
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** 18-minute read **
Finals are right around the corner. What should your final look like to gauge your student’s learning at school-year end that keeps in mind social-emotional wellness and fairness to our students in these unique times?
I believe until we are back in the physical classroom, the way finals used to look, especially at the high school level, should be put in the drawer for now. In light of an extremely dynamic school year with virtual learning at home, a U.S. Presidential election like no other, horrific happenings throughout our nation, almost on a daily basis, the pandemic woes, vaccination updates, social unrest, and racial concerns, our students have lived through a lot this school year, and still needed to do school at home.
And, add what’s going on at home, and our students have a lot on their mental and emotional plate.
In this post, I will provide your five strategies to give your finals a 20-21 SY facelift to, 1) give you a final that measures students’ knowledge and understanding, 2) makes students feel the final is not a big task, and 3) to increase the probability your students will complete it, complete it with effort, and submit it for credit.
The first strategy is to create a final that has three different versions (text, audio, and video). This strategy gives students options, and we know that offering options to students, empowers students and gets them to buy into the final before they answer the first final exam’s question.
So how would you do this…create three different versions of the same final?
To start out with our text version, create the final in a document such as MS Word or a Google Doc, and then either save the file and give students the directions to download and save or save a copy as in the instance of a Google Doc, complete the final by marking it up with text, saving it and then submitting it. Your students absolutely know this routine.
Another “text version” would be to copy and paste the Final questions that are in the MS Word document or Google Doc into an online quiz in your LMS, or you can use MS Forms, or another form application like Typeform. This way, you make the text version digital in a different way with a lot less steps! Using this way, offers many advantages: 1) you can set up the closed-ended questions that some are auto-correct, like multiple choice, multiple selection, true and false, or fill-in. Then, you would only need to grade the students’ open-ended question answers, and 2) students do not need to download, rename, save, complete, save again, and then submit.
Side note: Virtual learning data has shown, taking the traditional “worksheets” that we used to hand out and students completed with pencils, have a higher rate of submission if we turn those documents into quizzes for student ease with less steps in the process.
The audio version of the same final exam is creating the test in an online quiz as you did for the text version of the test, but along with pasting in the question, you record your voice for each of the questions. In this way, you may also want to make it conversational and add a few points to jog the students’ memory. Or you could just do this for students who may need accommodations.
Most LMS quiz elements make narrations easy to insert into quiz questions. However, if you are not using an LMS quiz element, take the text version you created, record your voice reading each question using a simple voice recorder (https://online-voice-recorder.com/). Save each recording naming it with the question number to make it easy for you to add these question recordings to your Final text version.
You will add them to an MS Word document following these steps (Insert > Object > Create from File tab > Browse for the file, choose to either place it on your final document as an icon <my suggestion because it will show an audio icon> or a link to a file). If your text version of your final is in Google Docs, there isn’t the same type of routine to add a file into the doc. But you could save your recordings online, and then create links to the recordings and add the links to your Google Doc final exam. No need to jot down these directions. I have a FREE GUIDE link at the bottom of the post for stepping you through all these three versions.
The video version is probably the richest version since video is the #1 preferred media type today. I would create a video of you reading the questions, and maybe adding a presentation of words, or showing a screen capture of your final and then placing the video in Playposit or Nearpod to ask the questions right after you say the question in the video.
You can also place the video in Microsoft 365 Stream and then create a quiz in an MS 365 Form with the questions. Then, you would add the Form to the Interactions part of the Stream video. Again, I’ll place instructions down below on how to create all three versions of your Final exam (text, audio, and video). Look for the FREE GUIDE link!
A second strategy is to create a final exam where students apply what they learned throughout the year and create an artifact based on the final assessment’s ask. For example, let’s say I am teaching a high school journalism class. Students learned all year how to write good samples of different kinds of writing. In my final, I could ask students to create a publication of their choice based on specific criteria in a rubric, so they know the expectations of what I am looking for in students’ final submissions.
Staying with the high school Journalism course final exam, I could offer students the options to create a 1) public service announcement (broadcast journalism), 2) news article (print journalism), or 3), webpage (digital journalism), or a sports writeup (sports journalism). Giving students authentic assessments where they are creating an end product based on the skills and knowledge, they learned in the course should definitely heighten their desire to complete the final exam.
A third strategy is a strategy I used when I was a School of Business professor for an Introduction to Business course in a PA university. My final exam did not have multiple choice, fill-in, or other closed-ended questions. Instead, I gave students three questions, each describing a different business scenario. One question concerned the accounting part of the curriculum. Another question was about management part of the curriculum and the third question was about marketing. After reading the business challenge in each scenario, students needed to create a solution recommendation plan for each scenario, playing the role of a business consultant.
However, students had the choice to work independently or with one or two partners. I will tell you; those final exam sessions were the best classes in my collegiate teaching career. Why? Because I heard students discussing the problem and reminding each other of business principles and practices. Students were researching content in their books and notebooks because I allowed them to use all the course’s materials.
What was the result? I heard and saw more learning take place in my final exam classes than I would have witnessed given I gave a multiple-choice final exam. An added benefit was I received the BEST feedback from students telling me they loved taking a final this way, they appreciated learning from their partners, and it was in the very few finals in their college degrees where they left the final knowing more than when they walked into the final. I remember, the average grade for the Intro to Business final that semester across the three sections of Introduction to Business I taught was an 83%. Now, THAT is the way you, as a professor, want to end a semester or school year of teaching.
My fourth strategy to revamp your final exams so students feel like taking them, doing well on them, completing, and submitting them is to have a list of topics that students learned in the class for the course. Make sure you have at least enough of topics where everyone can choose a different topic. I asked students to select their topics a week before the final and then they signed a contract about which topic they chose to complete the final exam for my class. I kind of made it a big deal so students would take my final exam seriously.
In my final exam, students created a learning resource about the content topic they chose for me and then I would use their educational resources with the new students who was teaching in the next semester or school year. Students had the choice to create a 1) presentation, 2) video, or 3) a webpage in our LMS. Also, students had an entire week to plan out what they wanted to place in the learning resource and work on it in class. Since everyone in the class had a different topic, students worked on their topic educational resources individually, but they were allowed to help one another with presentation, video, or webpage creation.
Not only did the students become subject matter experts in their topics, but they also had a week to work on it to make the end result high-quality. I have no problem giving students a week to work on a final exam project when we spent the other 35 weeks learning the content. Just as we all have interests and strengths in what we know and what interests us, I allowed students to choose their topic and then showcase their knowledge and skills in an end product of their choice. And, yes, I made sure I used their final exam end products in the next year’s or semester’s course.
The last strategy to revamp your final exam to get students to want to take it and do well on it is to make your final examination in the form of an Exit Interview and have students answer questions about the course content in your interview.
For example, below are possible questions. And students were told the answers had to connect to the content and could not be about the student’s grades or confusion in the content. In other words, the students’ answers needed to teach me about the content from their point of view and their reflections of their learning.
· What was your favorite unit and why?
· What did you learn in this course that has made the biggest impact on you and the way
you look at things?
What impact has it made on you?
· What did you learn in this course that caused you to look at it differently?
How did you look at it before learning in this course?
How do you look at it now?
· What did you learn in this course that you believe helped prepare you for something in
your future?
What is that “something” in your future?
· If you could stay in this course for another marking period, what would you want to learn more about and why?
· If you were President in the United States one day, what is one thing you learned in this course that you could use as the leader of this country?
You can create questions that better directly align to your content or your grade-level but the aim to the Exit Interview final exam is to get students to think back over what they learned, reflect on what they learned, and propose ways they can use the content they learned as they leave your class. Or they can share how the content they learned changed them as a person.
This type of final exam has a very metacognitive flair to it that I believe we need to immerse our students into more opportunities where they get to think about their thinking and learning, and the changes the two have made in their lives as a student and a human being.
Finding new ways to revamp the “dreaded” final exam, especially after the school year we all experienced, is worth it to end this school year on a high note for students.
You want your students to look back at your content with a smile. In middle and high schools, finals can be extremely overwhelming for students. And, as we move to do more in our classrooms that are proactive, interactive, and constructive, these final exam revisions are a way to do just that!
Getting students to feel good about what they learned as they leave our classrooms has a positive ripple effect on the way your content lingers on in their academic minds. To prepare our students to be the changemakers of the world calls for us to change the way we assess their learning in the last weeks of school. And the way we make them feel as they head out of our class has more power than the content, itself, in a broader point of view.
Here is the FREE GUIDE to help you create 3 different versions (text, audio, video) of your final exam in the first strategy.
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Please comment below—Are you going to revamp your final examination this school year by using one of my five strategies? Or do you have your own way to revamp your final exam? I’d love to read your ideas!
Share in the comments below. I would love to read all your feedback ideas.
Next week’s blog topic: How can you use the time at the end of the year and the summer to prepare students for next school year, and fill in the gaps?