Target Audience: High School Students

What is the Tip For? 

Teachers should harness a growth mindset in their students through the development of metacognitive skills that facilitate reflection and improvement in their work. One effective strategy is Assignment Wrappers. Assignment Wrappers challenge the idea that the learning from an assignment ends once it is marked, and instead prompts students to reflect and learn from the feedback they received and strategies they used. In so doing, teachers can change the student’s focus from the past (which they can do nothing to change), to the future (in which they can grow).

When Might it Be Useful?

Assignment Wrappers can follow-up any assignment, and can be made more in-depth for larger assignments, and briefer for shorter ones. For very short assignments, teachers may have students reflect on a single question.

How to Use Assignment Wrappers

So, how can you implement Assignment Wrappers? Once you hand back an assignment to students, ask them to read through the feedback, and answer some prompting questions. The goals of these questions should be to help students see the strategies they employed that worked, and where they can improve in the future. Teachers can also encourage students to take the next step and set goals for themselves to improve their performance and understanding for the next assignment. These goals can then be revisited in the next opportunity for Assignment Wrappers.

An Illustrative Example

Ms. Green’s History class has just completed a project in which they worked in small groups to develop a virtual museum exhibit with 5-10 significant items from WWII, each with a description of the artefact and why it is important to understand the history of the war. Miss Green hands back the marks and feedback to each of the groups and gives them a few minutes to read through them individually. Then, Ms. Green writes the following questions on the board, and asked the students to respond to each one in their journals:

  1. What strategies did I employ to do well on this assignment? How effective were those strategies?
  2. What aspects of the rubric did I overlook / could I have done better on?
  3. In what ways did I contribute positively to the group? In what ways could I have been a better group member?
  4. What are three strategies I can use next time to help ensure I improve?

Ms. Green wanders around the room supporting students through their reflection and facilitates a class discussion to help students get ideas from one another. She tells students she will ask them specifically about these goals in the next assignment and makes a personal note to remind them of this later. Finally, Ms. Green gives the students the rest of the class period to implement any of the feedback that they received into the project and detail the ways they did so, explaining they can improve their mark by demonstrating they have reviewed the feedback meaningfully.

The Research to Support:

Gezer-Templeton et al. (2017) explored the effects of exam wrapper assignments for an introductory food science and human nutrition course in a university setting. The exam wrappers were offered as an extra credit assignment after three exams throughout the semester. The majority of students completed all three exam wrappers, which involved answering the following 3 questions:

  1. How did you prepare for the exam?
  2. What types of questions on the exam were most challenging for you? Why do you think they were challenging?
  3. What changes to your study habits do you plan to make when preparing for the next exam?

The lack of control group prevented the researchers from making firm conclusions from the study, but the results are promising. The researchers found that “…students not only made the right plans, such as not waiting until the last minute to study but were also able to follow through with the plans they set for themselves” (pp. 33) and students indicated that they found the exam wrappers to be a helpful tool.

Gezer-Templeton, P. G., Mayhew, E. J., Korte, D. S., & Schmidt, S. J. (2017). Use of exam wrappers to enhance students’ 

metacognitive skills in a large introductory food science and human nutrition course. Journal of Food Science Education, 16(1), 28-36. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1541-4329.12103