Sometimes there’s no way around it. You just have to use exams. In a previous post I highlighted some of the exam modifications faculty should review as they are planning to shift their classes to an online environment. These include replacing large exams with smaller quizzes, making exams and quizzes open book, and replacing exams entirely with authentic assessments of learning.

But in some courses, exams have to stay because they prepare students for critical licensure exams. Passing rates on these licensure exams are not only markers of student success, but also of program quality. And they are vital to student recruitment and accreditation.

How will students fair in the fluid, stressful, and challenging conditions surrounding COVID-19? How will proctoring for online exams in these courses impact their stress levels and their performance?

To help prepare students to succeed in these challenging circumstances, consider pairing course exams with metacognitive activities and treating both as essential components of your course and final grades.

Cognitive wrappers, such as exam wrappers, are some of the best-known of these metacognitive activities. Exam wrappers are commonly discussed in relation to in-person classroom use. They consist of short questions prompting students to note how they prepared for an exam, the types of errors they made, and how they will prepare differently for the next exam. They’re most commonly discussed as something to be implemented immediately after an exam, collected by the instructor, and then returned to students shortly before the next exam.

But here I am advocating a different application – one in which the metacognitive activity and insights from the exam wrappers become a more continuous process and gain a greater presence within the course. Online delivery facilitates this process. When students complete an exam wrapper online shortly after one exam, such as through an online survey or quiz tool, they can easily access their responses at any later point, including as they begin work on the next unit. This immediacy helps students adjust their exam preparation techniques as promptly as possible following an exam, rather than shortly before the next one. Those adjustments might entail new ways of engaging with concepts, reviewing them, and practicing their application.

The immediacy and continuity of access provided by an online exam wrapper are important because exam wrappers help students focus on the planning phase of self-regulated learning, including:

• Evaluating their performance, process, or approach
• Reflecting on their performance, process, or approach, and
• Deliberately adapting their approach for future performances

In addition to online delivery, you can modify a standard exam wrapper by adjusting questions. Consider including a prompt asking students to indicate their use or disuse of techniques like spaced practice, interleaved practice, and self-explanation. In pandemic conditions, you might also prompt them to note aspects of their environment that impacted their preparation and what feasible steps they can take to reduce any negative impact.

Consider how you can best handle exam wrappers in your course grading and assessments. While many proponents of exam wrappers have suggested not grading them, depending on your setting you may find it helpful to grade exam wrappers on completion. If helping students learn how to learn is important to you, consider including a course learning outcome in this area of Dee Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning and use exam wrappers a low stakes assessment of this outcome.

If your course prepares students for licensure exams and you must use multiple high stakes exams in your course, consider gradually adjusting the relative weight of each exam and exam wrapper paired with it during the course of the semester. Particularly in pandemic conditions, this can reduce stress on students for the first exam and incentivize their thoughtful completion of the first exam wrapper as they are adjusting to a new course and new expectations. As they progress through the course, each exam can gradually take on more weight and the paired exam wrapper can greatly take on less weight. By the end of the course, the exam wrapper has filled most of its function, so the last exam may carry nearly all of the weight and the last exam wrapper carry only modest weight to ensure that students continue to identify preparation adjustments they can make prior to the licensure exam.

Example of Relative Weighting of Summative Assessments:

First Unit	Second Unit	Third Unit	Fourth Unit
65% Exam 1 35% Exam Wrapper 1	75% Exam 2 25% Exam Wrapper 2	85% Exam 3 15% Exam Wrapper 3	95% Exam 4 5% Exam Wrapper 4

Finally, to help your students get the most out of reflective and metacognitive activities like exam wrappers, some supporting steps in your course planning and teaching practice include:

• Explain the purpose of these activities, and specifically why you’ve paired wrappers with exams.
• Reiterate their purpose in your syllabus, course site in the LMS, and communications with students.
• Call out students’ good work on them, through individual and whole class feedback.
• Prompt students to share their preparation techniques with each other, whether through online discussions or a collaborative tips document.
• Develop a shared class vocabulary for reflection and metacognitive techniques.