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Open-book Exams: Do they hurt or help?

I do a lot of experimenting in my 2000-level educational psychology course because I teach it every semester and it is a medium-sized course.

Here are some examples:
  • I’ve compared using writing assignments vs. lecture only for covering behaviorism (not my favorite learning theory). No surprise here... Writing about the relevancy of behaviorism helps students understand the concepts. 
  • Using case studies with and without quizzes compared to lecture only. This was interesting because case studies did not help students better understand the concepts in educational psychology, even with the added extrinsic motivator of a quiz. 
  • Various ways to conduct in-class exam reviews, including collaborative study guides, crossword making, Kahoot games made by me, Kahoot games made by students, no review, Q & A style review session. I am still collecting data on this so I am not sure yet which review is most effective. I want to try all the varieties of each unit so if will take me several semesters. 
  • Self-selected field experience, observation only, or set structured field experience: This data collection is still in progress with this semester being the first one in which students are assigned a field experience  that I actually am involved in. More information about this here and here. 
  • Flipped classroom style video assignments: I just started this to increase in-class time for activities, but still feel like I don't have enough time!
However, this week I am wondering about assessment style. For many semesters I have done online exams that were not proctored. This made them open book automatically. This semester I switched to in-class closed book exams and students have struggled. The average has been in the 60s for the past 2 exams. Because I was away at a conference and my students didn’t have much of any in-class review, I decided to experiment and allow them to have an open book exam in class this week.
Image result for open book

What do you think of these type of testing practices? I know it depends on what the objective of the course is, but in the real world we look things up all the time... however, it is valuable to have information internalized so that we can apply it automatically...

Well... the averages reveal that although they did slightly better than the last two tests, there is no significant difference and they did better on their very first exam. So there is probably an interaction effect between time, content, etc.

Now I am not sure which option to give them for the last exam of the semester. Maybe I will show them the data and argue that their books and notes don't help. 

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