Abstract
When instructors first flip their classroom, many quickly come to the stark realization that they must employ some mechanism to hold students accountable for coming to class prepared. Often this ends up taking the form of a daily quiz on the out-of-class preparatory material. While this typically achieves the intended goal of extrinsically motivating the students to do their pre-lecture preparation, these quizzes bring their own challenges, such as student resentment, test anxiety, and dealing with student absences or sickness. This paper presents an additional assessment mechanism, student-generated pre-lecture Concept Reflections (CRs), to be paired with a daily quiz to address many of the challenges commonly encountered with daily quizzes. First, the CR setup is presented, including student examples. Next, 441 student-generated CRs and a student survey are analyzed in a variety of ways to better understand how the students engage with the CR format. Not only are the challenges inherent to daily quizzes virtually eliminated by the complementary use of CRs, but a host of additional benefits emerge for the students’ learning. These benefits can be categorized under three main areas: stimulating intrinsic motivation and curiosity, enhancing cognition and memory, and developing metacognition and self-regulated learning. Finally, as an added side benefit, the instructor reaps a plethora of new analogies and examples to share with the class and future classes to aid understanding and retention of course concepts.