Exit Interviews: Laboratory Assessment Incorporating Written and Oral

Article Cite This: J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX

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Exit Interviews: Laboratory Assessment Incorporating Written and Oral Communication Garland L. Crawford and Kathryn D. Kloepper*

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Department of Chemistry, Mercer University, 1501 Mercer University Drive, Macon, Georgia 31207, United States ABSTRACT: The teaching lab is an important component of training and developing undergraduate chemistry students. The lab provides a complex teaching environment where faculty address a number of student-centered goals, including the development of technical proficiency, demonstrations of theoretical concepts, promotion of teamwork, and modeling of data analysis and scientific communication. A low-stakes assessment for encouraging student preparation, self-reflection, and synthesis of material, called the exit interview, provides students with guided written and oral exercises on performed laboratory tasks and planned postlab data analysis by combining a written lab wrapper with an oral interview. This approach provides opportunities for students to practice oral communication on a performed task, which, in turn, builds lab confidence. Recommendations for incorporating exit interviews into other chemistry courses, including larger laboratory sections, are included. KEYWORDS: First-Year Undergraduate/General, Second-Year Undergraduate, Upper-Division Undergraduate, Laboratory Instruction, Communication/Writing, Testing/Assessment, Quantitative Analysis, Professional Development

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context for the lab experience in a time frame proximate to its execution remains a challenge but would greatly benefit student development. Here a new teaching strategy that aims to address these challenges is described. Exit interviews are a way for instructors to assess laboratory students through guided written and oral assessment exercises focused on reflection and synthesis. The design, implementation, assessment, and outcomes of exit interviews used in a sophomore-level analytical chemistry course are reported. Recommendations for implementation in additional courses are provided, including suggested modifications for larger class sections.

aboratory is often the highlight of undergraduate chemistry education. It is here that students are given the opportunity to “do science” by demonstrating or testing theoretical concepts, by developing hands-on skills, by learning professional communication, and by employing critical thinking.1−4 The emphasis on each of these broad, laboratory-teaching goals may change depending on the nature of the particular course. However, the historical norm of expository laboratories has made it challenging to fully capture the interest and focus of students in laboratory work.5−8 Many, especially in this Journal, have reported on ways to improve student engagement and learning by redesigning laboratory experiences to go beyond these cookbook laboratories, incorporating such approaches as authentic research,3,8−16 role playing,17,18 service learning,19−22 and collaborative learning.23−28 Chemistry instructors often find the accurate assessment of student learning and growth in the laboratory challenging, as traditional laboratory reports tend to focus on calculations and final results. Despite the best efforts of faculty, school-savvy students can effectively isolate their experience with the execution of the laboratory procedure from their generation of the assessment product, such as a written lab report. Determining a student’s true understanding in lab can be difficult to capture in a report submitted some time after the completion of lab, especially when students are working in groups.29 Others have found ways to go beyond traditional lab reports to attempt to promote and assess higher-order learning in the laboratory, such as through the use of highly scaffolded lab reports30−33 or alternative assessment strategies like electronic documentation,34−38 posters,39−44 and oral assessment.45−47 However, immediate self-reflection and the identification of © XXXX American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.

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INSTITUTION AND COURSE BACKGROUND Mercer University is a medium-sized institution with 12 colleges and schools serving undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. The Department of Chemistry, which offers Bachelor of Science degrees in chemistry, chemical commerce, and, in a joint offering with the Department of Biology, biochemistry and molecular biology, is housed in the College of Liberal Arts. Quantitative Analysis, CHM 241, is a sophomore-level course for students in these three majors. It can also be used to fulfill requirements for a minor in chemistry. The current prerequisite for CHM 241 is General Chemistry II, but most students also complete Organic Chemistry I prior to CHM 241. Enrollment for CHM 241 is approximately 72 students in lecture and a Received: November 19, 2018 Revised: March 11, 2019

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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.8b00950 J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX

Journal of Chemical Education

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Previously students had been asked to hand-write the procedure into their laboratory notebooks, a practice already implemented in the general chemistry and organic chemistry lab sequences. The expectation was that handwriting the steps verbatim would force students to think about each procedural step; in reality many students self-reported doing this at the last minute or late at night when they were least focused. Prelab quizzes administered before lab on the course management system required students to answer questions about procedural steps and perform sample calculations, but these, too, did not produce the anticipated gains in student lab preparation. Additionally, the goal was for these online prelab quizzes to be self-graded by the course management system, so the required multiple choice or numerical answers did not provide a wealth of options for higher-order questions. Finally, a different prelab quiz was used in the form of partner quizzes, called “Stoplight Quizzes”.48 Prior to the start of lab, students were given a timed prelab quiz consisting of a list of selected procedural steps with a request for each step’s main goal or purpose. Students were given a set amount of time during the prelab lecture to complete the quiz without notes or help using a provided green pen. Then students paired up with their lab partner and discussed their answers. Students were given an orange pen in place of the green one and could modify any answers they wished. During grading, the professor marked questions in red; zero points were awarded for red answers, half-credit for correct orange answers, and fullcredit for correct green answers. These three-color Stoplight quizzes encouraged discussion between partners before lab, which helped facilitate efficient starts once they were in the lab. These previously attempted strategies (handwriting the procedure verbatim, online prelab quizzes, and in-person Stoplight quizzes) did help students prepare for lab and increased their efficiency in lab, but they did not connect students to the assessable product, the lab report. Students showed increased awareness of what they were doing in lab but not of what they would be doing with the data collected. Since previous strategies had focused on prelab activities, the authors believed that a brief assessment immediately following the lab might encourage student preparation and reflection on the laboratory activity, which brought up the idea of an exam wrapper-type experience. Exam wrappers, a short set of questions typically given when an exam is returned, have been used successfully in a number of science and math classes to promote metacognition and reflection.49 Additionally, the authors had observed previously that student focus in lab and confidence after lab both increased following a direct interaction with an instructor. The authors hypothesized that aspects of exam wrappers, if used immediately after a lab activity, might help students reflect on their learning in lab and encourage better preparation. Thus, an exit interview, a structured assessment that combined written and oral reflection, was designed and implemented. In addition to promoting preparation and reflection, the interview would provide an opportunity for students to develop oral communication skills and to use technical language in a low-stakes, professional interaction. Assessment of this new approach, which is described more fully later in this paper, included a pre- and postsemester student survey of free-response and Likert-scale statements to supplement the observations of the instructors.

maximum of 24 students in each section of the laboratory. Typically, lab is led by one instructor who is assisted by one or two undergraduate teaching assistants. For the iteration of Quantitative Analysis described in this work, both authors were present for each lab meeting. Content covered in the CHM 241 course addresses fundamental techniques for quantitative chemical analysis. Lecture topics include statistics, equilibria, calibration methods, separations, spectroscopy, instrumentation selection, and electrochemistry. Laboratory exercises address quantitative techniques such as titrations and UV−vis spectroscopy. Students are provided with the procedure, laboratory report, and report rubric prior to lab. For the first seven laboratory meetings, students are provided with detailed procedures that they are expected to read and understand prior to lab. Over the course of the semester, specific instructions are left out, and students are prompted to make more procedural decisions. For example, for a lab with a glucose assay, students are given the range of concentrations for their standard solutions but must write their own instructions for preparing their five solutions within that range. The remaining weeks of lab are spent on a semiguided project; in this iteration of the course, students focused on scaling down the glucose assay for a 96-well plate reader. Students are assigned lab partners at the start of the semester, and many of the laboratories are performed directly with their partner. When laboratories are performed individually, students are encouraged to check in with their lab partners during lab, especially if either of them have procedural questions.

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EXIT INTERVIEWS

Rationale

The authors previously observed students working on, but not connecting to, laboratory exercises. Although students were asked to read the procedure prior to lab and complete preparatory calculations and/or procedural steps, once in the laboratory many could not articulate the rationale or significance of their work. This was especially apparent when the authors would stop by a work space to ask questions while the lab was in progress. Some students claimed that they understood what they were doing but just could not explain it in the moment. This response indicated that, at a minimum, students had insufficient informal laboratory communication skills but also captured the student’s lack of focus and understanding of the lab task at hand. While laboratory reports required students to work up data, give the main goal(s) of the lab exercise, and reflect on individual steps, when students were asked about lab content (on a later exam or on later lab reports) student responses suggested that this apparent reflection was short-lived. Informal conversations with colleagues at Mercer and other institutions, especially at the 2014 and 2016 Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, confirmed that our observations of disengaged and underprepared laboratory students were not unique to our course. If the laboratory is arguably the most important application of undergraduate chemistry, why were students not fully utilizing the experience? How could students be encouraged to prepare for lab, stay aware and focused throughout, and make connections between lab experiences and other course content? Was it possible to model the impromptu conversations in lab to assess student understanding and promote preparation? Reflection on these questions and on activities previously implemented in the authors’ Quantitative Analysis and other chemistry courses helped develop and formalize exit interviews.

Approach

Exit interviews included two components, a written lab wrapper and an oral interview. Students received the lab wrapper at the B



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conclusion of lab. This one-page sheet included the prompts in Box 1. Working individually initially, each student wrote his or

The effect of exit interviews on students’ attitudes and lab preparation strategies was assessed through pre- and postsemester surveys; this study was approved by Mercer University’s Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects Research (H1803069). Student perceptions of the exit interviews was assessed with the Likert-scale statements in Table 1 and the free-response questions in Box 2. Results are discussed in detail in the individual subsections below.

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LAB WRAPPER (WRITTEN COMMUNICATION) 1. 2. 3. 4.

ASSESSMENT

Overview

Box 1. Composition of an Exit Interview

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What is the goal(s) of today’s lab? What new skills did you learn? What skills did you refine or improve? Compare with your lab partner and summarize the differences in your responses.

Table 1. Student Perceptions of Exit Interviews in the Postsemester Surveya

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS (ORAL COMMUNICATION)

1. How did it go today? 2. What did you learn? 3. How does this lab help you improve your understanding of lecture material? 4. Question specific to the lab. 5. Question specific to the lab. Sample lab-specif ic interview questions: • How will you decide what value to report for your concentration of HCl? • In lab today, not all of the experimental details were provided to you. Describe one of the decisions you and your lab partner made, and how you came to that decision. • Give one similarity and one dif ference between the plate reader and the spec20.

Statements for Student Response Q1. Exit Interviews (EIs) made me nervous. Q2. I was less nervous about EIs as the semester progressed. Q3. Knowing I would take an EI helped motivate me to prepare for lab. Q4. Knowing I would take an EI helped me better prepare for lab. Q5. EIs helped me make connections between course material and lab. Q6. EIs helped reinforce lab material. Q7. My performance on EIs improved during the semester.

Mean Scorea

Responses of Strongly Agree or Agree,% (N = 67)

4.0 3.7

73 68

4.2

85

4.2

83

4.1

83

4.4 3.8

85 59

a Students responded using a Likert-type scale with a range of 1−5: 1, strongly disagree; 2, disagree; 3, neutral; 4, agree; 5, strongly agree.

Box 2. Free-Response Survey Questions

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her answers to the lab wrapper questions directly on the provided sheet. After each lab pair finished their wrappers, they compared answers and recorded differences. The lab wrapper questions were the same for the entirety of the semester. Students then individually were taken to a quieter location, generally the hallway, for their oral interview. These interviews typically took 3−5 min and were graded in real time by the instructor. These interviews consisted of five questions (Box 1). The first three questions were the same for the entirety of the semester. The first question was designed to open a conversation and to alleviate student anxiety about the exit interview. The second question provided an opportunity for students to speak about an aspect of the lab upon which they had reflected for the written wrapper and discussed previously with another student. The third question allowed the interviewers to gather data about how students see connections between the lab and lecture. For all exit interviews given during the semester, questions 1−3 were the same and generally resulted in full credit for the students. The fourth and fifth interview questions were specific to that day’s lab activity. These questions were designed weekly based on the nature of the lab and the requirements of the lab report. Students were not given these questions ahead of time. The exit interview grade was incorporated into the overall lab report grade, with 0.5−1.5 points out of 15 for the exit interview. Lab reports were 15% of the total grade for the course; therefore, the exit interviews were not a large contributor to the overall course grade. The first exit interview was not scored to allow the students to adjust to the format. Exit interviews generally earned half or full credit. Student were informed of their grade before leaving, and they also received explanations of correct answers to questions 4 and 5.

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QUESTIONS ON BOTH PRE- AND POSTSEMESTER SURVEYS 1. Are you comfortable in lab settings? Briefly explain. 2. What is your comfort level with communicating verbally (without notes) about what you accomplished in a given laboratory exercise? Briefly explain. 3. How do you prepare for lab? 4. How do you make connections between lecture topics and lab activities?

QUESTIONS ON PRESEMESTER SURVEY ONLY 1. What are you most nervous about for this lab course?

QUESTIONS ON POSTSEMESTER SURVEY ONLY 1. How have exit interviews helped you improve as a student? 2. Which courses should include exit interviews?

Student Expectations

While all assessment strategies, whether they are written or oral, closed book or open notes, can invoke anxiety, it was important to the authors to determine how much the overall process of the exit interview caused students to be nervous over the course of the semester. From the outset, students expressed apprehension about the unknown nature of this new assessment strategy. Students did not know what to expect for the first exit interview, which was given at the end of the first lab meeting during the C



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Table 2. Comparative Student Perceptions of Exit Interviews by Assessment Administration Perceived Comfort Level, % (N = 67) Questions for Student Response Are you comfortable in laboratory settings? Briefly explain. What is your comfort level with communicating verbally (without notes) about what you accomplished in a given laboratory exercise? Briefly explain.

Assessment Timing

Comfortable

Somewhat Comfortable

Not Comfortable

Presemester Postsemester Presemester

64 87 24

24 12 52

12 1 24

Postsemester

70

24

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about what you accomplished in a given laboratory exercise?” (Table 2). Most of the survey responses coded as somewhat comfortable or uncomfortable. Approximately 12% of respondents on the presemester survey directly mentioned that they have never been asked to verbally communicate lab results; interestingly, some of these respondents still indicated that they would be comfortable doing so. By the end of the semester, the comfort level of students shifted dramatically up, with 70% of students reporting being comfortable or very comfortable with verbally communicating lab accomplishments, 24% somewhat comfortable, and only 6% uncomfortable. In responses that coded as comfortable or somewhat comfortable, there were several common themes observed: benefit of the repetition of the exit interviews each week, benefit of being better prepared to speak about lab material, and the benefit of gaining more confidence with speaking to others about science. The students who indicated they were still not comfortable with verbally communicating lab results cited the need for more time to think through answers and being nervous speaking in front of someone else; some of those who stated they were somewhat comfortable with verbal communication at the end of the semester also included similar sentiments. Additionally, there was not a clear correlation in the presemester survey between students uncomfortable with lab settings and students uncomfortable verbally explaining lab accomplishments. Some of the students who expressed the most confidence at the start of the semester expressed strong concerns about the oral communication requirement and vice versa. The authors anticipated that the most confident students in the laboratory would also profess to be the most comfortable with verbally communicating lab results, but that was not the case. In fact, even a respondent self-identifying as a laboratory assistant for general chemistry was not comfortable at the start of the semester with verbal communication. This highlights the benefit of exit interviews for all students, not just the strongest or weakest ones. While not every student was comfortable with exit interviews by the end of the semester, it is unlikely for any instructor to find a graded assessment strategy that is comfortable for all students. The benefits gained by students from exit interviews, as determined through student responses and instructor observations, outweighs the discomfort it may cause some students at the onset. Being an effective communicator is central to every career (both in chemistry and in other disciplines), and exit interviews present students with the opportunity to practice scientific communication in a low-stakes environment.

second week of the semester. Students were given information about the overall format of the lab wrapper and interview questions, but they were not provided ahead of time with the written or oral questions. In the presemester survey, which was administered in the first week of class, students were asked, “What are you most nervous about for this lab course?” Of the 67 students who responded, the following were common responses: 30% messing up/being wrong; 21% the exit interview; 18% data/results; 6% not nervous. Many students approached the first interview with visible trepidation, with several commenting that they were nervous for the oral questioning. Over the course of the semester most, but not all, students indicated verbally that they became more comfortable with the exit interview process, and the authors observed the class as a whole to be more comfortable with the process. Still, results from the postsemester survey in Table 1 indicate that exit interviews made students nervous, with 73% agreeing or strongly agreeing with the statement in Q1. However, Q2 results support the instructor observations of students’ decreasing nervousness as the semester progressed. In order to investigate further students’ potential discomfort with exit interviews, students were asked to describe their overall comfort in a lab setting and their comfort with communicating verbally about lab accomplishments (Box 2 and Table 2). It was important to specifically ask about comfort with oral communication, as the authors hypothesized that the repetition of exit interviews, especially the oral interview component, would help students become more comfortable discussing lab goals and outcomes. Asking students about their comfort with oral communication helps separate this aspect of the course from the overall student comfort in a laboratory setting. Generally, the authors observed across the course that students become more comfortable with laboratory settings as the semester progresses. Additionally, since Quantitative Analysis is typically taken in the spring of sophomore year at Mercer University, students have completed at least two lab experiences within the general chemistry sequence, and often laboratories as part of general biology, physics, and Organic 1; thus, it was expected that many would already be comfortable in a lab setting at the start of the semester. Student comfort data is summarized in Table 2. Free responses were blindly coded as comfortable, somewhat comfortable, or not comfortable independently by both authors and an outside evaluator. As predicted, the number of students comfortable or somewhat comfortable increased by the end of the semester, leaving only 1% of responses of not comfortable with laboratory settings. These numbers suggest that a majority of students were comfortable in lab already and that exit interviews did not negatively affect overall lab comfort. Students also were asked at the start and end of the semester to provide and briefly explain their answer to “What is your comfort level with communicating verbally (without notes)

Promoting Intentional Preparation

Historically, it has been challenging to get students in Quantitative Analysis to go beyond just reading the lab procedure prior to lab to thinking more deeply about goals and anticipated outcomes. Although students are provided with the laboratory procedure, report, and rubric all in one online D



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Reflection and Integration

document, traditionally students have not even looked at the lab report questions until after lab concludes. One goal of exit interviews was to help students better connect individual lab procedural steps with overall lab goals. It was hypothesized that the exit interviews would encourage more students to consider the goals and main outcomes of lab prior to arriving in lab, especially by reading through and thinking about the lab report questions. The hope was that exit interviews, although a relatively low-stakes part of the overall grade, would encourage students to strive to understand lab steps rather than just work through directions. Assessment of the effect of exit interviews on students’ lab preparation was performed by instructor observations, informal discussions with students, Likert-scale questions, and a prompt on the pre- and postsemester surveys (Table 1 and Box 2). Overall, exit interviews motivated students to prepare for lab, even though the overall impact on the course grade was small. Students also mostly agreed that exit interviews helped them better prepare for lab. These quantitative data were clarified further by answers to the free-response questions. Analysis of student responses to the free-response question “how do you prepare for lab?” yielded an overall class movement from task-oriented preparation activities at the start of the semester to more integrated and contextual understanding activities by the end of the semester. For example, at the start of the semester, 94% of students stated that they prepared for lab by reading the procedure. Of these students, only 25% stated they prepared by attempting to understand the lab, either directly stating so or mentioning higher-order learning activities such as visualizing lab steps or looking up unfamiliar concepts. By the end of the semester, this number increased to 46%, with much richer descriptions of preparation activities, including thinking through lab steps until full understanding occurs, asking questions of the instructors, and anticipating results. There were several unexpected outcomes as well pertaining to student preparation. After the first week, students knew that the lab wrapper questions and first three interview questions would be the same for all exit interviews, and students often could predict the fourth and fifth lab-specific interview questions, as these were developed from the lab report. The instructors expected that students would come to office hours ahead of lab to request to go over potential answers in order to prepare a perfect “script” for their oral interview. Although students were not forbidden from doing so, fortunately this did not occur. The new behavior that was observed was a large increase in students meeting with lab partners prior to lab. Many students reported that they met with their lab partners to go over the lab procedure and report questions prior to lab with the specific intent to understand them better and prepare for the exit interview. They self-reported practicing in the same style that they would be given in lab; that is, they did not hone a specific script but focused on informal oral communication. This increase in lab partner cooperation prior to lab fostered new study relationships within the class that would not have occurred without the exit interviews. These conversations between lab partners prior to lab focused on the exit interview additionally led to gains in laboratory preparedness. A decrease in the number of students attending office hours with questions about the lab report was observed by the authors. This could be attributed to the immediate feedback provided to the students at the end of the exit interview.

One of the goals of implementing exit interviews was to better understand how students synthesize course material, especially with respect to making connections between lecture content and laboratory activities. Previous work has indicated that students often struggle to connect these two areas of their education.2,5,7,50 In the student perception questions (Table 1), the majority of students, 83%, agreed that exit interviews helped them make connections between course material and lab. Even more students, 85%, agreed that exit interviews reinforced lab material. Several notable trends were apparent in the pre- and postsemester survey question about connecting lab material to lecture material. At the beginning of the semester, students reported making lab−lecture connections in mostly passive and/ or reactionary ways, such as during exam review or when answering lab report questions. A modest number of respondents at the start of the semester used language that indicated proactive thinking about possible connections. In fact, several students commented that they either did not typically explore ways lecture might connect to lab or were not sure how to make such connections. In the postsemester responses to “how do you make connections between lecture topics and lab activities”, students overwhelming indicated more active and developed thinking about course material. Students were more detailed about how they made connections between lecture and lab and when they spent time doing so. More students indicated thinking about lab and lecture connections ahead of assessment activities, and many described making connections as they thought through procedures prior to lab. While this shift to more active learning connections might not be fully attributable to exit interviews, it does bring up an additional dimension of student learning that instructors should strive to help promote and improve. Interestingly, although the majority of students believed that the exit interviews helped them connect course and lab material as indicated in the free-response questions, during the actual exit interviews, the instructors observed that students struggled during the oral interviews to make significant, nonsurface connections. Collectively, students were challenged the most each week with interview question 3, “How does this lab help you improve your understanding of lecture material?” (Table 1). When pressed to give specific examples of concepts that the lab helped elucidate, most students fell back on main lecture topics (essentially reciting headings from lecture slides) rather than provide specific examples. For example, when using spectroscopy in lab, students would acknowledge that we had discussed these instruments in lecture but often failed to provide specific examples of how the lab enhanced their understanding of the lecture material. This class-wide inability to make richer connections between lecture and lab material in the moment, while stating at the end of the semester that they improved in this area, suggests a need for further examination into how faculty and students may differently perceive the connections between lecture and the laboratory. This observation also highlights the importance of ongoing efforts by instructors to help students make explicit and specific connections, as students may struggle to do this on their own, or, more significantly, may not realize that they are failing to make appropriately advanced connections. Instructors should consider how they can help students recognize such connections as well as how think beyond basic course topics. It is interesting to note that when students were asked if performance improved on exit interviews during the semester, E



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different laboratory arrangements. For example, teaching assistants could administer and grade the oral part of the exit interviews. Alternatively, students could be asked to record answers to the questions, with the recordings viewed by the instructor and/or teaching assistants at a later time. The authors also did one iteration of exit interviews with lab partners. In this iteration lab partners still filled out the lab wrapper individually and then were interviewed together. This worked well and could be done throughout the semester to reduce the number of oral interviews per lab section. Partnered exit interviews also give instructors insight into the dynamic between lab partners and give students additional practice with group work. Future work will explore the role that exit interviews play in student learning. For this study, the class average on the American Chemical Society Analytical Chemistry exam increased by 2.5 correctly answered questions over the previous year, a small, but statistically significant, change (p < 0.02), while there was no significant difference between the populations’ GPA in General Chemistry II, the prerequisite for the course (p < 0.95). With the information collected here, we cannot state if exit interviews were the sole contributor to this increase, so this may warrant further investigation. The authors also plan to further study how partnered exit interviews affect learning and communication skills as well as ways to incorporate exit interviews into online course instruction, particularly for nonmajors courses.

only 59% agreed or strongly agreed that they improved over the course of the semester. In reality, the grades on exit interviews improved as the semester went on, and the authors found that collectively responses improved, too. Additionally, overall lab grades were not significantly different from previous years when exit interviews were not used. While the exit interview provided a portion of the overall lab grade, the authors found the strategy to be equally, if not more, effective as a formative assessment. Answers to the exit interview questions provided a snapshot of the class’s understanding of many lecture topics. Individual misconceptions could be easily addressed based on student’s answers to exit interview questions four and five, which were based on the lab report. Students were provided the correct answers before leaving and encouraged to apply their new understanding immediately. Additionally, the authors could compare answers across the class to identify trends and potential points of confusion for students.

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CONCLUSION Exit interviews are an effective assessment strategy that helps develop oral communication skills and student confidence in lab, while promoting preparation and reflection. Overall student perception of exit interviews was positive. At the end of the semester students were asked “how have exit interviews helped you improve as a student?” The most common themes observed in the responses were improvement in preparation, improvement in soft skills (presenting orally, thinking on feet), improvement in understanding, and improvement in confidence. Only three students (n = 67) responded that exit interviews have not helped them improve as students. Representative student answers are provided below: “I have actually learned what is going on in lab by preparing for the interview.” “They make you really think about what you did in lab instead of blindly following a procedure.” “Exit interviews have kept me from being a lab robot that only comes in and does the procedure, then leaves. It made me understand while I was actually doing it.” “[They] helped me better communicate what I learned in lab.” “When I do the lab report I have an idea of where to start and also know why we did a certain step, rather than not knowing and doing the lab report wrong.” “They have helped me become more confident in talking to authority and help me prepare for lab.” Exit interviews have wide applicability. While described here only for a sophomore-level analytical chemistry laboratory, the authors have also found success with using exit interviews in a senior-level biochemistry capstone laboratory. The framework described in this work allows for the adaptation of exit interviews to a range of levels and subjects, with particular suitability for other chemistry lab courses, biology laboratories, and physics laboratories. In fact, when asked which courses should include exit interviews for assessment, 32% of the students surveyed in this work (n = 67) indicated that all lab courses should incorporate exit interviews into assessment compared with only 9% stating that no courses should use exit interviews. Here exit interviews were given to students in laboratory sections capped at 24 cotaught by two faculty and facilitated by two undergraduate laboratory assistants. The authors recognize that lab classes often have higher enrollments with less favorable student to faculty ratios. There are several recommendations for incorporating the exit interview strategy described herein with

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AUTHOR INFORMATION

Corresponding Author

*E-mail: [email protected] ORCID

Kathryn D. Kloepper: 0000-0001-9551-5805 Notes

The authors declare no competing financial interest.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors are grateful to Amanda Roper, Hannah Vann, and Summer Perritt for coding and transcribing our student response data.

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REFERENCES

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Exit Interviews: Laboratory Assessment Incorporating Written and Oral

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