Open-book exams allow students to take notes, texts or resource materials into an exam situation. They assess examinees’ ability to find and apply information and knowledge.
Open-book exams are authentic or real-life-like: at work
people use various reference materials when they need to
answer a question, analyze an
issue, write a report,
or solve problems.
Why not teach students how to do
it via the application of open-book exams? Today there
is so much professional information,
so that to memorize it
all is both
impossible and harmful (overloading
the brain).
Open book examinations
permit to avoid
rote memorization of exceeding
amount of information and to
use reference materials
instead. The memorization
which does take place is
meaningful. The emphasis is on
understanding and not memorization.
Open-book tests
have the potential
to better measure
students’ ability to
organize and apply
information when/where suitable rather than simply memorizing it
while not being able to apply the right
facts in the right place
(as an argument in discussion, for instance).
While the
ability to recall information is indeed an
important cognitive goal and
as such it has to be assessed - it is the lowest-level
ability in Bloom’s (Krathwohl,
2002) hierarchy of
educational objectives in the cognitive domain),
higher level abilities – the abilities of
application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation – also have to be taught and assessed.
Open-book testing, thus, emphasizes higher order thinking
skills. Feller (1994) believed that traditional (closed-book) examinations
test only what
students can memorize,
while open-book examinations have an
increased potential to
measure higher level
thinking skills and relate
more closely to
real-world work
environments.
He believed the open book examination was one method for
incorporating realistic, open-ended tasks into
higher education. Let us
both agree and disagree. But, probably, closed book demand
too much: both memorization and analysis/creativity.
But do higher
scores always mean better
knowledge/skills or do
they just mean
that the test
was easier?
However, we
believe that this mostly
concerns students with high internal motivation (accompanied by learning goals), who do want to learn, but
are frightened of exams. The level
of anxiety of
students taking an
open-book exam with
high extrinsic motivation (accompanied by performance
goals) who just want to pass the
exam is expected to be even higher than
at the traditional exam, where rote memorization and skillful cheating can help
the student pass.
For students who have
really studied for
the exam the open-book exam
is a sort of an
insurance in case they
forget some details,
so for them
this format definitely
reduces test anxiety.
For those students who at the
exam see the textbook for the first time (or have superficially
studied a couple of topics), finding
the necessary information
there is too
difficult if possible
at all. So
this format is a
nightmare for them, unless they are great at fast reading.
Time factor is even
more pressing, as not
just reading technique, but also deep comprehension has to be achieved during
the exam, unless the text was deeply studied beforehand.
open-book exam trains the learners to manage their time,
tighten their writing and present it in concise and accurate terms. In the process
of exam preparation students with learning goals in mind not only have
lower levels of anxiety, but also concentrate on comprehension, not
memorization. They do their best to use effective emphasizing techniques
(for example, marking
in different colors
names, dates, facts,
definitions, etc.). The textbook becomes for them an effective guidebook
which they can use not only for passing the
exam, but also for
their further professional
experience.
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