Flash 15: Assignment Wrappers

Do you want students to meaningfully engage with feedback on assignments? Assignment wrappers encourage reflective practices that supports building study skills and fostering deeper engagement with course materials before or after students complete assignments.

outline of a candy wrapped in candy paper against a yellow background

In this 15-minute micro session video, you’ll learn about assignment wrappers, how you could implement it in your teaching context, and the modifications you could make to make this technique fit your teaching needs.

 
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Assignment wrappers encourage reflective practices that encourage students to engage with feedback on assignments.  On this video, you will see:

  • What the approach is and the research that supports it.
  • How to implement.
  • How to adapt it to different teaching contexts.
  • How to use a planning tool to help you implement.

Why is this teaching technique effective?

Assignment wrappers have been studied in many interdisciplinary contexts, particularly in STEM. Marsha Lovett in 2013 wrote a comprehensive overview of exam wrappers—linked on the resource page—and since then, there’s been a lot of research on the implementation of these tools in a variety of contexts, many in STEM fields (see Sethares 2022 for a review)

 

  • Students perform better on assessments – the effect seen across studies generally a positive correlation between use of exam wrappers and exam or course grades (Lovett 2013, Gezer-Templeton et al. 2017, Hodges et al. 2020, Edlund 2020)
  • Increased their metacognitive skills, that is knowing how they learn, by reflecting on their practices—guide students to reflect on time management and task processing skills (Sethares 2022, Dang et al. 2018, D'Souza and Broeseker 2022)
  • Encourages the adoption of high impact learning strategies and can encourage students to experiment with more effective practices or seek support (Williams 2021, Bowen 2017, Dang et al. 2018). The wrapper activity can serve as a launch pad for discussion with you as the instructor!. Even in studies where an impact on course grades was not seen (Stephenson et al. 2017), students did note adopting new study strategies. This follows other scholars who have suggested that exam wrappers might be most effective when situated in a larger practice of metacognitive skill building within and beyond a single course (Soicher and Gurung 2017)