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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.

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.

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.

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.