Department of Biology, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA.
PLoS One. 2013 Aug 12;8(8):e70270. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0070270. eCollection 2013.
This study examined the effects of exam length on student performance and cognitive fatigue in an undergraduate biology classroom. Exams tested higher order thinking skills. To test our hypothesis, we administered standard- and extended-length high-level exams to two populations of non-majors biology students. We gathered exam performance data between conditions as well as performance on the first and second half of exams within conditions. We showed that lengthier exams led to better performance on assessment items shared between conditions, possibly lending support to the spreading activation theory. It also led to greater performance on the final exam, lending support to the testing effect in creative problem solving. Lengthier exams did not result in lower performance due to fatiguing conditions, although students perceived subjective fatigue. Implications of these findings are discussed with respect to assessment practices.
本研究考察了考试长度对本科生物课堂中学生表现和认知疲劳的影响。考试测试了高阶思维技能。为了检验我们的假设，我们向两组非专业生物学学生施测了标准长度和扩展长度的高级考试。我们在不同条件下收集考试成绩数据，以及在同一条件下考试前半部分和后半部分的成绩数据。结果表明，更长的考试时间导致在不同条件下共享的评估项目上的表现更好，这可能为扩散激活理论提供了支持。它还支持在创造性问题解决中的测试效应，导致期末考试成绩更高。尽管学生感到主观疲劳，但较长的考试时间并没有导致因疲劳条件而导致的表现下降。这些发现的意义在评估实践方面进行了讨论。
