title: The grass isn't always greener: perceptions of and performance on open-note exams.
abstract: Undergraduate biology education is often viewed as being focused on memorization rather than development of students' critical-thinking abilities. We speculated that open-note testing would be an easily implemented change that would emphasize higher-order thinking. As open-note testing is not commonly used in the biological sciences and the literature on its effects in biology education is sparse, we performed a comprehensive analysis of this intervention on a primary literature-based exam across three large-enrollment laboratory courses. Although students believed open-note testing would impact exam scores, we found no effect on performance, either overall or on questions of nearly all Bloom's levels. Open-note testing also produced no advantage when examined under a variety of parameters, including research experience, grade point average, course grade, prior exposure to primary literature-focused laboratory courses, or gender. Interestingly, we did observe small differences in open- and closed-note exam performance and perception for students who experienced open-note exams for an entire quarter. This implies that student preparation or in-test behavior can be altered by exposure to open-note testing conditions in a single course and that -increased experience may be necessary to truly understand the impact of this intervention.
authors.affiliation: *Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697 bsato@uci.edu (pavan.k@uci.edu).
authors.forename: Brian K
authors.initials: BK
authors.lastname: Sato
authors.affiliation: School of Education, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697.
authors.forename: Wenliang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: School of Education, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Warschauer
authors.affiliation: *Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697 bsato@uci.edu (pavan.k@uci.edu).
authors.forename: Pavan
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Kadandale
mesh_terms: D001695:Biology / Q000193:education*; D004521:Educational Measurement; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010465:Perception; D012044:Regression Analysis; D013334:Students
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