Fostering Student Success: Turning Off Practice Assessment Rationales to Improve Proctored Assessment Scores.

Preparing students with opportunities to practice critical thinking skills is essential to success on the National Council Licensure Examination. This pilot study was conducted to explore the effectiveness of turning off practice assessment answers and rationales on a standardized examination. A retrospective study compared students' scores when rationales were turned on and turned off. Eighty-one percent of the students were able to achieve the benchmark when the answers and rationales were turned off as compared to 71 percent when turned on. Faculty can utilize these findings to inform remediation strategies.