Getting More Out of Midterm Assessments

Abstract

An important reason for providing midterm assessments is to give students early feedback on their progress. Ideally, students will carefully analyze their performance and use the feedback provided to adjust their study strategies or approaches to engaging with the course materials. In our experience, however, only a small fraction of students seek advice from instructors or advisors after an unsatisfactory performance. Research has shown that many students have negative perceptions of office hours, and some students find them inconvenient or have misconceptions about the purpose of office hours. In addition, it is difficult for instructors to provide detailed and individualized advice to a large number of students in a weekly office hour. To address this challenge, we automatically provide additional grades that inform students on their performance in four basic question categories that are related to levels in Bloom’s taxonomy. We also provide a table with specific recommendations for how to improve in each of these categories. These recommendations are based on experience: from conversations with students, we have learned that unsatisfying performance can often be traced back to a lack of effective exam preparation. Many students study by reading solutions to in-class activities or homework rather than reworking problems. We also noticed that struggling students often fail at a fundamental level: they tend to read definitions superficially as symbols instead of interpreting them and exploring their meaning.