Helping Students Help Themselves Learn: Providing Learning Insights Based on Wrapper Responses in a First-Year Large-Enrollment Organic Chemistry Lecture Course

Abstract Transitioning from general chemistry to organic chemistry can be challenging for students because of changes in the expectations for how students should think and what they should do. Strong metacognitive skills make students well positioned to successfully navigate this challenge, but not all students enter higher education with these skills. Aiding students with weaker metacognitive skills is often challenging because of the difficulty in providing effective and timely interventions. This study investigates the regular implementation of a tool called a “wrapper” combined with a subsequent “report back” of the wrapper results in a traditional first-semester large-enrollment (450+) organic chemistry lecture course taught in the students’ first year. Wrappers are metacognitive reflection practices that ask students to reflect on their preparations for assignments, the effectiveness of those preparations, and how they will prepare for similar assignments in the future. Our wrapper experience combined a traditional wrapper associated with exams (“exam wrapper”) with an instructor component reporting back insights (“report back”) shortly thereafter. These insights highlighted similarities and differences in responses between student “performance groups”, defined using exam grades, with the intent of aiding students in choosing more effective learning strategies for future exams. This study is the first to specifically examine the impacts of instructors giving feedback based on wrapper responses in the chemical education literature. End-of-semester survey results indicated that students self-reported finding the wrappers and instructor-curated insights useful, that they correspondingly made changes to their learning strategies, and that, in general, those changes led to stronger learning and academic performance.