Many of today’s college students have experienced disruptions to their education due to the COVID-19 pandemic, negatively affecting their personal well-being as well as their academic preparation. Encouraging students to embrace effective and meaningful study habits can be one way to improve their college readiness and confidence in learning.

One professor at Western Iowa Tech Community College designed a mandatory post-test reflection and correction for students and saw dramatic improvement in their performance on the second exam. The assignment encourages students to strengthen their study habits and hold themselves accountable for making meaningful changes.

What’s the research: Students say their biggest challenges when studying are time management (47 percent) and distractions from technology or other people (both 38 percent), as well as a lack of sufficient time (34 percent), according to a 2024 survey from Kahoot. Forty-one percent of respondents indicated they experience anxiety while studying, compared to 34 percent who said they feel confident.

Test corrections, also called exam wrappers by teaching and learning centers, are activities delivered before or after an assessment to help students consider how they study and ways they could improve their practices before the next exam.

Past research on exam wrappers has found that implementing the strategy can improve course and exam grades, as well as students’ level of metacognition and changes to study habits.

For years, Frank O’Neill, a sports medicine instructor at Western Iowa Tech, has offered students the opportunity to complete an optional correction worksheet after each exam. Typically, the students who take him up on the opportunity are the ones already excelling in the course, he said—not those who could benefit from additional support.

“My primary goal is to turn a D student into a C student,” O’Neill said.

This summer, O’Neill decided to run an experiment and see if making the test analysis and correction worksheet mandatory would have any impact on students’ grades.

The assignment: After students take an exam, O’Neill’s assignment asks them a series of reflection questions on their study habits as well as a post-test commitment to improving their test-taking abilities.

Some of the questions are designed to help O’Neill understand which study strategies students employ and how they correlate to their grades.

For example, he’s learned that a student who’s less confident entering into the assessment more often receives a higher score than their confident peers, which O’Neill believes is because students who have studied longer have spent more time wrestling with the material and consider it to be difficult, compared to their peers who skim notes and think they’ve learned content.

Other questions prompt students to consider their test-taking abilities and the errors they make frequently. Sometimes students indicate that they got a question wrong because they changed their answer from the correct response to an incorrect one, O’Neill said, which allows him to encourage more confident responses.

“Your brain is smart; your gut is smarter than your brain,” O’Neill said. “You gotta go with that gut.”

Students can also provide feedback to the professor on how to improve the course. Sometimes O’Neill gains insights from test performance and frequently missed questions to understand how to make content clearer in the future.

The assignment requires students to correct every incorrect response on the test, which O’Neill says serves as a study technique as well, because exams are cumulative, so students will need to know the right answer later. It also fosters a growth mindset among learners, helping them reframe their learning and consider how to fail forward and see assessment as progress toward their goals, O’Neill said.

The impact: O’Neill is teaching two sections of microbiology this summer with 20 students enrolled in each section.

After the first exam, O’Neill assigned all students in one section to complete the exam wrapper, which would add five points to their grade. The other section could complete the optional wrapper but without points attached.

By the second test, the difference between classes was clear; the optional correction section showed little to no difference in grades between exams one and two. In the mandatory correction section, the average exam grade rose nine percentage points.

Since he first offered the assignment, O’Neill hasn’t received any negative feedback from students about having to complete the exam wrapper, which he attributes in part to his commitment to avoid giving students “busywork,” instead explaining the purpose behind each assignment. He’s also seen self-reported levels of test anxiety decrease over the course of the semester among students who use the wrapper and fewer students failing or dropping the class, signaling the personal benefits of the worksheet.

O’Neill now plans to assign the post-test reflection to all the courses he’s teaching this fall, for about 200 students in total. He’s also exploring opportunities to digitize at least portions of the assignment in the college’s learning management system, Canvas.

Do you have an academic intervention that might help others improve student success? Tell us about it.