Collaboration or copying? Student behavior during two-phase exams with individual and team phases

Abstract

Abstract. Students take a two-phase exam twice: once individually, and a second time working in teams. Proponents hope that during the team phase, students will discuss, debate, and resolve questions by sharing their reasoning, challenging each other, and reaching consensus. Potential adopters fear that students might uncritically follow the majority answer or mimic one dominant team member. To explore this empirically, I data-mined students' solo-and team-phase responses from the final exams of three different introductory physics courses to construct multiple measures of team dynamics. My results substantiate prior findings that teams do engage in meaningful debate and explore the virtues of various possible answers. The two-phase exam implementation used does not force teams to submit a common answer, allows students to "hedging their bets" for partial credit, and incentivizes helping teammates.

Group Formation on Physics Exams

“…We compared our students collaboration characteristics to those from Beatty's study using the measures developed there. [2] Comparisons between open collaboration environments and closed collaboration environments do not show major differences between the different types of collaboration. However, further study is required to determine what meaningful differences are for these collaboration parameters.…”

“…Our implementation (detailed in the next section) is similar to the one used by Beatty [2], with one key difference. We allow open collaboration among all students during the exam period.…”

“…In 2015, Beatty came up with five metrics for discussing collaboration on group exams. [2] We apply each metric to our data, using the groups identified by the community detection analysis. We will only report the final exam for each class in our data set, as that is the exam that was reported on by Beatty.…”

“…We will use tools developed in the network analysis community to describe the networks our students create on group exams. In the next sections, we will discuss the details of our implementation of group exams, look at different ways that the classroom structure influences student collaboration, and examine some of the different collaboration metrics introduced by Beatty [2] in our classes.…”

“…To that end, group exams have come into use in STEM classrooms across multiple disciplines [2][3][4][5][6]. While each implementation is slightly different, a common implementation is the two-phase exam.…”