Group Exam as an Instructional Technique to Promote Consistency Checking in Student Reasoning

Many students tend to provide intuitively appealing (but incorrect) responses to some physics questions despite demonstrating (on similar questions) the formal knowledge necessary to reason correctly. While these inconsistencies are typically persistent even in active learning environments, we believe that adding a group component to the exam may engage students sufficiently to resolve these instances of inconsistent reasoning. In our study, students were given opportunities to revisit their answers to questions known to elicit strong intuitively appealing (but incorrect) responses in a collaborative group component of an exam immediately following a traditional individual component. Students discussed their responses with group members but were required to submit their own answers and reasoning. In this presentation, we will examine the effectiveness of a collaborative group exam approach in addressing and resolving inconsistencies in student reasoning and will compare the effectiveness of this approach to a more traditional peer instruction technique.