The Anti-Quiz
27 Mar 2009 9 Comments
in teaching
As a student, I rarely enjoyed taking quizzes. Either I did poorly because I didn’t understand the information being quizzed (often math), or did well because the quiz was so easy as to be worthless for me (usually in English class), or earned an average score and didn’t retain any of that information.
As a teacher, I’ve been moving more and more towards an anti-quiz philosophy. When I first started teaching college courses, I had occasional reading quizzes, especially in a class on art appreciation that was not meant to be writing-intensive. But as I’ve moved towards teaching courses that are writing-intensive, I have trouble justifying quizzes. I can’t identify a translatable skill, in writing, reading or life itself, that maps well to quizzes. Here are some candid reasons I’ve heard for the usefulness of quizzes (from a wide variety of teachers in-person and online):
* students don’t read if they’re not quizzed on the basics of the reading
* students who don’t read pay the price when they do poorly on quizzes
* students who are reading get rewarded by doing well on quizzes
* quizzes can lessen the impact of major assessments that have gone awry
So basically, we teachers often use quizzes as both the carrot and the stick, or as cushions when we need to inflate grades for one reason or another. Shouldn’t we be designing assessments that require reading the text? Is it our job to lessen the impact of tests that a class bombs, if they well and truly earned that bomb? What about short writing tasks, class participation, journal entries or other exercises that also reward the student who is reading and offer a reality check for the student that isn’t, while also building skills like writing?
Another more pedagogic reason:
* quizzes can be a good way to assess student knowledge of discrete pieces of information, most often vocabulary or grammar, or dates and facts for other disciplines
* quizzes are easy to grade, which especially for an English teacher, can lighten the heavy load of essay grading we all bemoan from time to time
Right now, the only quizzes I give as a teacher are part of an ongoing year-long grammar curriculum that I helped design. The students spend a full period about every other week studying a different unit of grammar (sentence fragments, verb tenses, pronouns, etc), and at the beginning of each grammar day, they take a quiz on the preceding lesson’s material. The questions are most often sentence-correction style, in keeping with the curriculum’s focus on grammar-in-writing. So far, while the students seem to be working well in the lessons and practice exercises, their quiz grades are often not good, and it’s made me wonder. I watch them sit with their books, trying to cram for the quiz, desperately reviewing material they should already know, and I think maybe it’s the quiz’s fault. Would they be this panicky if it wasn’t called a quiz, or would they take it less seriously and dismiss it? Would they be better able to show off their acquired skills if the assessment was somehow writing based? What would that assessment look like? How would it be graded?
I’m interested in your thoughts on quizzes, either as students, teachers, or parents. Am I overreacting? Do I have an unfair bias against quizzes?
Mar 27, 2009 @ 07:20:55
I think the usefulness of a quiz is determined by the type of material that is being learned. I also think different types of quizzes accomplish different things—I’ve known other instructors who gave quizzes which were much more like short in-class essays (with real pedagogical weight behind them) rather than the traditional, quick, five-question quizzes that have straightforward answers based on objectively-verifiable facts.
I have taught 2 years of upper-division psychology courses at a large state university, and although I personally have never assigned quizzes, I can see how they may be useful (and actually, now that I am thinking about this, I may consider adopting them in the future).
The primary reason I would assign a quiz would be to break up large, detail-intensive units into manageable chunks. As an example of this, the first time I taught Psychopharm, we did a very dense unit on neurotransmitters—there’s tons of information, and after several weeks, the details can become muddled. I had students suggest that I break that unit into smaller sections. They weren’t specific about what they thought would work better, but I think what they had in mind may have been akin to the idea of having smaller quizzes to assess their progress before having the large exam. In courses where the material builds incrementally such that each successive concept depends upon having mastered the previous concept, I think a quiz is useful. I think this strategy may be more useful for science courses, but I could be wrong.
Mar 27, 2009 @ 07:28:35
Amy, you’re absolutely right– when I say “quiz,” I mean quick, traditional, short-answer verifiable quizzes. Often English teaches use them as reading comprehension checks, for plot points, character names, etc.
I think students should have a sense of how they are progressing before they get hit with a major assessment– I just don’t think those kinds of quizzes have to be the only way that happens. Again, this is based on my own experience teaching humanities courses.
Apr 04, 2009 @ 03:47:16
I’ve been sitting on this post and thinking about it. So I must admit I hated quizzes when I was a student. I too found them less than useful. But as a teacher I think I see their usefulness. FYI, I don’t quiz my students, but they are in grad school so I am less concerned with whether or not they are reading.
I think their usefulness is multifaceted:
1. It does provide an incentive to read. Weekly quizzes help keep students paying attention.
2. It helps the student get an opportunity to see how much understanding they have of the material. See: your husband’s complaint about law school’s 1 final exam only.
3. It helps you, as a teacher, identify who needs more assistance or attention.
I think however, you should not weight the quizzes heavily in their final grade…or at all. Just don’t tell them that ahead of time.
As far as your concern about studying for the quiz…we see that type of problem in standardized testing all the time (The Wire) and you ask if it is the quiz’s fault. Yes and no. If they are supposed to know it, then they should know it, quiz or no quiz. But, I think the quiz oftentimes does lead to cramming and panicky study habits because the quiz itself is faulty. Too often quizzes and tests are testing what students don’t know rather than what they do know. I think perhaps English class does not lend itself to objective tests such as multiple choice, and perhaps (I know it is more labor intensive) much more useful are quizzes that let them write about what they think about the reading in a directed way. It doesn’t have to be long, 2-3 sentences, 3-4 questions and that way they can benefit from the periodic assessment aspect of the quiz and you can get a read on their involvement in the class and particular needs.
Apr 04, 2009 @ 03:48:04
Wow, excuse the poor sentence structure in the 1st paragraph!
Apr 05, 2009 @ 02:27:54
Yes, exactly– I want to know their involvement, their needs, and to see what is engaging them and what is leaving them cold. I want them to also have a sense of their own progress or difficulties. I want periodic assessments, and I want to be instilling study habits and ways to prepare for assessments that will serve them well long after they are in my class.
I still have an icky feeling about the incentive part– still feels too much like the carrot and stick way of encouraging anyone to learn anything. I like the idea of creating a way for them to show what they know, but for me, that usually ends up to a creative project or full-fledged essay. I guess I need to think more about how a shorter assignment could do that.
May 04, 2009 @ 22:08:01
I lied. Sometime I use quizzes: I’ll have all the kids write a question and answer on a notecard, collect them, and then ask five. Of course, I stick my own notecard in, too. This forces review (in writing the question) and helps me gauge understanding, based on the sorts of questions they write, although I may give them simple directions like, “Not a nit-picky question but one you’ll know if you read recently and had good understanding of the chapter.”
May 06, 2009 @ 00:20:31
Emmit, I like that idea a lot– I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the grammar quizzes my students have written for themselves this quarter since I posted this entry. I’m thinking about ways to revamp that aspect for next year so that I can further advance beyond basic quizzes.
Thanks for stopping by!