What Happens When Students Test Together
unlocking active learning for nurse educators
Episode #17
💬 What if ...?
What if students tested collaboratively in an environment similar to practice?
🔑 Key Insight
Researchers split 100 undergraduate nursing students in an emergency nursing course into two groups: one tested the usual way, working through quizzes and exams on their own, and the other took the same quizzes and exams collaboratively, discussing answers with a small group before submitting.
The two groups started on equal footing on the very first quiz. But from the second quiz onward, the collaborative-testing group pulled significantly ahead, and stayed ahead for the rest of the course. That gap held on the higher-stakes exams too: the collaborative group scored significantly higher on both the mid-term and final written exams.
Students in the collaborative group also reported high satisfaction with the format. Researchers found that it helped sharpen skills that can be difficult to measure on exams, such as communication, critical thinking, and teamwork.
🌟 Why it Matters
- Turning even one routine quiz into a small-group, discuss-then-answer format might be worth trying on content students tend to forget quickly.
- Letting students work through practice questions together before an exam could give them a version of retrieval practice that also builds communication and teamwork skills along the way.
- Since the improvement in scores didn't show up until the second test in this study, giving a collaborative format a few rounds before deciding whether it's working might be worth keeping in mind.
🔗 Link and Reference
Atalla, A. D. G., Ramadan Atta, M. H., & Salem Ghattas, A. H. (2025). Unlocking students' potential beyond traditional exams: The influence of collaborative testing on nursing students' retention and soft skills. BMC Nursing, 24, Article 595.
DOI: 10.1186/s12912-025-03237-z | Open access