As the name indicates, the collaborative exam consists of placing learners in a situation of collaboration to do their exam. The collaborative exam may be formative or summative. When teachers employ this evaluation strategy, they are allowing learners to learn to collaborate on a common task and, consequently to take advantage of the quality of results of the collective effort which permits them to benefit from the team synergy. This has many advantages: greater self-esteem, more success, enhanced motivation and commitment in terms of sophistication of argumentation, more in-depth learning, the generation of new ideas, an improvement in the quality of the transfer, greater respect for individual differences, and improved social integration and psychological well-being.
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In this article, the authors explain the precise nature of a collaborative type of exam, referred to as the “two stage exam,” or the pyramid exam, and how to set it up. Drawing on their own experience with science students, they stress the reasons teachers and learners appreciate this type of evaluation, in particular, its ease of implementation and the greater learning and collaboration which result. They also offer possibilities for teachers who wish to employ a collaborative exam.
In this article, the author demystifies the collaborative exam, distinguishing it from cheating, and drawing on the fact that human activity generally requires collaboration. Based on a classroom experiment with a “two stage” collaborative exam, he also explains that this evaluation strategy significantly benefits both the weaker and the stronger students. In addition to getting automatic feedback from their peers, the learners also manage to obtain better grades on open questions as a result.
In this article, based on an experiment with a large group of students in an introductory sociology course, the author explains that, in addition to being an evaluation tool, the collaborative exam is also an appropriate instrument for peer learning. Thus, while students learn during their collaborative exam, those who know the material better also have an opportunity to teach those who are less familiar with it.
In this article, the authors present an exhaustive review of the literature on the advantages of the collaborative exam based on experiences of other researchers in various educational contexts.
The authors present their observations after an experience with a collaborative exam with students of chiropracty. Thus, in contrast to learners having taken exams on an individual basis, those who had weekly collaborative quizzes not only performed better on the whole on other exams for the course (collaborative and individual), but also demonstrated a better attitude to evaluations.
In this article, the author reports the results of an experiment with a collaborative exam for a large group of first year law students. His observations indicate that this evaluation strategy contributed significantly to student learning and compared favourably to that of those who took individual exams.
In this video, a professor from the University of British Colombia shares his experience with two-stage collaborative exams. A student also relates some advantages of this measure for his learning, that is, better retention of course concepts and less stress about evaluations. The images from a video recorded in class during a collaborative exam show how engaged learners may be throughout the entire process.
This document presents a procedure to set up a two-stage collaborative exam in a higher education course. A dozen good practices also guide the teacher who wishes to experiment with a collaborative exam for the first time (for example, the pedagogical justification for the students, the duration, the size of the teams, the type of collaborative exams, the types of questions, etc.).
In this article, the authors present the results of research to measure the effects of the two-stage collaborative exam on students’ individual learning in a college level science course.
Their analysis of the results reveals that the learners performed significantly better in an individual pop quiz administered three days after the collaborative exam after having answered the same questions in the individual section of the collaborative exam.
Thus, this research demonstrates that the two-stage collaborative exam contributes to improving students’ learning due to the highly productive, motivating and communicational environment (with immediate feedback from peers) in which it places them.
In this video, the professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard first explains why he administers his two-stage collaborative type of exams (for example, increasing students' motivation to learn, integrating active learning during an examination, and developing their abilities to debate the topics of the course, as well as to collaborate).
Then, based on a study of 900 students, he shows the impact of the collaborative exam on standard deviation: in comparison with the results obtained individually, the collaborative portion of the exam increases by one standard deviation for all learners and by 1.5 for super students.
Klinger, M., Levy, D. and Svoronos, T. (2017). Learning from Two-stage Exams, abstract of a video, shared January 16th, 2018, on the blog of Svoronos. YouTube, 9:28 à 22:25 minutes.
In this podcast, the professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard explains how he uses the collaborative exam, and shares his observations in the light of some effects of this measure on public administration students’ learning, such as the development of their abilities to debate and to collaborate.
Svoronos, T. 2017. Collaborative Exams with Teddy Svoronos. Teach Better. Podcast #64. 55:09 minutes.