Helen Weixu Chen, Victoria Sakhnini, Lesley Istead (2026) — University of Waterloo / Carleton University. arXiv preprint (cs.HC).
Chen, Sakhnini and Istead run a three-wave longitudinal study in a senior software-requirements course where students could use instructor-provided or self-created cheat sheets in exams. Choices were shaped by trust in instructor expertise, desire for personalization, and preparation efficiency, and shifted over time. The make-vs-take decision is fundamentally a metacognition and self-regulated-learning question — creating a cheat sheet is itself a generative study strategy — with direct implications for exam design in authentic-assessment, for optimizing preparation such as adaptive-pretesting-retention, and for cognitive-structure views of exams like learnopt-exam-cognitive-structure. It also frames the trade-off AI raises: offloading artifact creation versus learning through creation, cf. cognitive-offloading-speedup-illusion.
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Citation
APA: Helen Weixu Chen, Victoria Sakhnini, Lesley Istead (2026). Make or Take: How Students Navigate Self-Created and Instructor-Provided Cheat Sheets. arXiv:2607.24736.