The increased number of questions that the freshmen faced on the collaborative exam could have presented a cognitive overload that contributed to a perception of the material as a "collection of unrelated facts" and reduced their ability to retain the information.
(2003), the collaborative exam was already reduced to a subset of the original exam, and students were then tested for retention with the exact subset of questions.
For the collaborative exam, our students retook the 20 novel questions from the individual exam.
However, in our study, the collaborative exam consisted of more questions.
A second difference between our and Bloom's (2009) studies that may contribute to the observed differences in retention is the format for the collaborative exam.
First, having more questions on the collaborative exam for the freshman course could exacerbate the aforementioned differences in how novices and experts deal with information.
Secondly, testing retention with the exact set of questions from the collaborative exam could have resulted in improved recall without improved understanding, as mentioned earlier for the Bloom (2009) study.
To encourage a good faith effort on the collaborative exams, we added percentage points to students' individual exam scores based upon the following scheme: group exam scores of 90 100%, 80 89%, and 70 79% resulted in increases in individual exam scores of 5%, 3%, and 1%, respectively.
Overall, students reported that they enjoyed the novelty of the testing methodology (question 11), found collaborative exams to be less stressful than a traditional exam format (question 12), and would be interested in future classrooms with similar testing pedagogies (question 13).
Because learning is fostered by feedback, students should get more benefit from collaborative exams when they interact with classmates as a "community of learners," promoting the "elaboration of knowledge structures" and fostering individual awareness of personal learning processes (Wood, 2009).
