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quizzes

innovative quiz strategies

An Innovative Quiz Strategy

Here’s an interesting way to incorporate collaboration in a quizzing strategy, with some pretty impressive results.

Beginning with the mechanics: students took three quizzes in an introductory pharmaceutical science course. First, they completed the quiz individually. After answering each question, they indicated how confident they were that their answer was correct—5 for absolutely certain and 1 for not knowing and guessing. Then for a period of time (length not specified in the article), they were allowed to collaborate with others seated near them on quiz answers. After that discussion, they could change their quiz answers, if they desired. At that point, they again rated their confidence in the correctness of the answers. Quiz answer sheets and confidence levels were then turned in. Immediately, correct quiz answers were revealed and once again students had the opportunity to discuss answers with each other.

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Maryellen Weimer, PhD June 1, 2018

Ideas for Rethinking Your Quiz Tactics

If your quiz strategies are becoming stale, this free report is loaded with fresh ideas that will help you better understand why you are using quizzes, what you hope they will accomplish, and how they can best be used to facilitate student learning.

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Faculty Focus March 7, 2018
young prof in library

More on Evidence-Based Teaching

In last week’s post, we looked at a sample of the discipline-based evidence in support of quizzes with the goal of gaining a better understanding of what it means to say that an instructional practice is evidence-based. We are using quizzes as the example, but this type of exploration could and should be done with any number of instructional practices.

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Maryellen Weimer, PhD February 8, 2017

Five Types of Quizzes That Deepen Engagement with Course Content

I’ve been rethinking my views on quizzing. I’m still not in favor of quizzes that rely on low-level questions where the right answer is a memorized detail or a quizzing strategy where the primary motivation is punitive, such as to force students to keep up with the reading. That kind of quizzing doesn’t motivate reading for the right reasons and it doesn’t promote deep, lasting learning. But I keep discovering innovative ways faculty are using quizzes, and these practices rest on different premises. I thought I’d use this post to briefly share some of them.

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Maryellen Weimer, PhD March 30, 2016

A Quiz Design that Motivates Students

Many faculty members use quizzes to keep students prepared and present in class. The approach often tends to be punitive, however, motivating students by extrinsic means. Karen Braun and Drew Sellers, who teach beginning accounting courses, wanted to use quizzes in the usual ways—to get students coming to class having done the reading, to arrive in class on time, and to participate in class discussion, but they wanted their quizzes to be more about intrinsic motivation and less about assessment. How did they achieve that objective? They incorporated a number of “motivational” design features into their use of quizzes.

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Maryellen Weimer, PhD December 19, 2013

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