College science exams are an important and widespread marker for student progress towards technical careers. Predominantly enacted using traditional teaching practices, exams also represent an opportunity for significant improvement in higher education. To explore the potential benefits of a particular style of exam assessment known as exam preview methods, a mixed methods experimental design was enacted in science classrooms across fields and with five faculty instructors at community colleges in the United States. Parallel sections were randomly assigned to be assessed either with the faculty’s traditional method or with exam preview methods, and data (primarily coded interviews and learning gains) were analyzed for impacts of implementation. The results together suggest significant benefits for students in exam preview sections when triangulated between different types of data. When weighed against a modest average time cost for implementation of the new method, these data suggest that exam preview methods may be a straightforward and useful innovation for a range of science classrooms. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2026 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.
Wiggins et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: