- Friday 16 August 2019
- 0 Comments
Teaching is changing. Today, there is more focus placed on equality and welfare, and supporting students through their learning. Thankfully, the old way of 'drill and kill' has mostly gone by the wayside in favour of different teaching tools that are more effective at fostering a love of learning while reinforcing and consolidating skills. One of our favourite resources is quizzes!
Why are quizzes so valuable?
Not only are quizzes fun for students, they are also a sneaky form of learning as they don't feel like a traditional activity. Quizzes can help your students practise existing knowledge while stimulating interest in learning about new subject matter.
Collaboration in small groups
You can set your quizzes to be completed individually or in small groups. In groups, students can brainstorm to help each other. Some of the discussions they could have would never happen in an individual test.
Do quizzes help us retain information?
Retrieval does, in fact, aid retention of a concept, as found by Roediger, Putnam and Sumeracki (2011). Reading information, then consolidating and testing that knowledge in the form of a quiz is an effective way of helping retain the information.
Quizzes can help identify gaps in knowledge
Once students have completed a topic, why not hold a quiz on what they have covered? It is a fun way to end a lesson, while showing the teacher if there any gaps or areas they need to cover again in more depth. Leaving the answers open-ended can produce some great results.
Quizzes can help revision
To help students prepare for an upcoming exam or test, why not prepare a quiz to highlight any gaps in learning? It will also create a template of keywords and phrases for students to memorise. Ten keywords or sentences is a lot easier to remember as a guide, and seems far less daunting than having to revise the whole topic.
With this in mind, we are going to delve into our Primary quizzes series. This series is a set of three books for ages 5-7, 8-10 and 11+. In each book there are 40 quizzes, accompanied by a teacher notes page for each quiz. They can be presented and marked in a variety of ways, allowing students to work individually or in groups. Recording sheets are provided to record students’ results. Suggestions for expanding the topics in each quiz are also provided, covering a range of curriculum and skill areas.
Each of the 40 quizzes in Primary quizzes contains 15 questions selected from the following headings:
| 1. Maths | 8. Famous people |
| 2. Animals | 9. Geography |
| 3. General knowledge | 10. People of the world |
| 4. Historical events and places | 11. Performing arts |
| 5. Language | 12. The environment |
| 6. Sport | 13. Literature |
| 7. Technology | 14. Our body |
Each quiz is made up of a variety of question types. Half of the questions for each quiz use prompts to help students find the correct answer. The question types using prompting are:
- multiple choice
- missing words (e.g. 'A meat-eating plant is the Venus ...')
- true or false
- first letter provided (e.g. 'What, starting with 'w', is a unit of electrical power?')
The difficulty of the questions varies within each quiz, with some questions more likely to require access to resource materials (e.g. an atlas). Each question requires between a one- and three- word answer, with the majority requiring only one word. For most questions, there will only be one correct answer; however, the teacher may need to use their discretion in some cases.
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Suggestions for presenting and expanding the quizzes
- The quizzes may be given orally to the students by the teacher, but as some of the questions will require research, it is suggested the quizzes are photocopied to be answered by individual students or groups of students.
- Teachers may like to set up a weekly competition among groups of students.
- The quizzes may be made self-competitive, with each student plotting his/her progress from week to week. All results should be recorded on the class record page.
- Teachers may mark each student's quiz or call out the correct answers for students to mark the quizzes themselves. This may also encourage debate about the answers.
- Teachers could give a time limit for the students to complete each quiz.
- Students may like to create their own topical quizzes to challenge the class, using the book's quizzes as a template.
- The 'Further Exploration' and 'Internet Challenges' given for each quiz could be expanded further by teachers or students. For example, teachers may wish students to complete an entire project on one of the topics.
- Teachers may ask each student to complete the quiz individually, then call out the answers to mark. Once marked, the teacher can place the students in groups so they can explain their answers and help each other research the correct information.
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Each quiz has a teacher notes page to accompany it, which is broken down as follows:
BEFORE THE QUIZ explains any difficult vocabulary contained in the questions that teachers may need to explain before students complete the quiz. A list of suggested resources students may need to access for each quiz is also provided. Note: It is assumed that encyclopedias will be available in the classroom when students are completing any of the quizzes.
ANSWERS for each quiz are provided. The answers to all the quizzes are also found at the back of the resource.
FURTHER EXPLORATION contains activity suggestions from a range of curriculum areas based on five of the questions from each quiz. Teachers may wish to use these with a whole class or allow individual students or small groups of students to complete one or more of the activities.
DID YOU KNOW? is a snippet of additional information based on one of the questions, provided for students' interest. Teachers may like students to research other questions and provide their own snippets of information.
Suggestions for exploring the question selected for 'Did you know?' is provided in the form of an INTERNET CHALLENGE. Students can complete this individually or in small groups. Adult supervision will be required as students will need to used internet access.
Do you use quizzes in your classroom?
How do you use them? We would love to hear more about them in the comments below.