Utilizing Quizzes for Deeper Understanding

Quizzes, although often a helpful tool in determining where students stand as far as comprehension in your course, can become monotonous over time.  Rethinking the ways in which you utilize quizzing could be the answer to breaking up the monotony of question after question, and instead provide students as yourself new and interesting ways to look at and work with information.

According to an article by Maryellen Weimer in Faculty Focus, there are five types of quizzes you may not have normally considered that could spice up the ways in which students approach your class, and improve their engagement with the content overall.  And the best news?  Some of them are really quite simple to implement.

Option #1:  Mixing Up Your Quiz Structure

Although it seems too simply, switching up the formats of your quizzes between multiple choice, short answer, opinion-based, open-book, take home, group quizzes, short essay, you name it, can really help provide a way for students to deal with the content in more diverse and intriguing ways.  Providing them with quizzes that supply multiple outlets for them to express what they know and are able to do with their newly learned information make them more apt to continue working with that knowledge as the semester progresses.

Option #2: Collaborative Quizzing

Collaborative quizzing is actually a neat little tool to use when you’d like your students to have some time to talk through their ideas and theories about a particularly dense or challenging piece of reading.  You might have students first complete their quiz individually, flip it upside down on their desk, and then take some time to discuss their thoughts and struggles with those around them.  Then, after the allotted discussion time, provide them a few extra minutes to go back through their quiz to review and change answers as needed.  This promotes the idea of utilizing resources and gaining perspective with the elements you are working with in class. 

If that’s not quite your style, try quizzing students twice, once individually, and once in a group using the same quiz.  The two quiz scores can be combined and averaged in some way according to a pre-determined policy you discuss with your students to create one grade to enter into your grade book.  Regardless of how you chose to do it, collaborative quizzing is a great way to get students enthusiastically discussing course content and also reduces test anxiety.

Option #3: Quizzing with Resources

As a preparation for class, have students take detailed notes on the content for the day.  Let them know ahead of time that they’ll be able to use their notes on their quiz to ensure that they work hard to comprehend the material and write notes that are helpful and effective.  According to research, open-note quizzing leads to higher final exam scores when coupled with collaborative work and discussions in the classroom.

Option #4: Quizzing After Questioning

Before you send out a quiz to be completed, set aside some time to discuss any questions about potential quiz content.  Providing students with possible responses and working through the issues and struggles they’ve been having together will help them to better understand content previous to quizzing rather than receiving a poor score for not understanding complicated material.  If someone asks a question that stimulates a lot of good discussion, that question becomes the quiz question and students have the designated amount of time to write an answer.  Or if a variety of good questions is discussed and answered by the students, the instructor can make the decision to then designate that everyone has completed the quiz as a large group discussion, earning them all full credit for their participation and debate.  This approach encourages students to ask deeper questions and provides ample information for better classroom discussions.

Option #5: Online Quizzes Completed Before Class

This is a relatively common option that is easy to implement in your courses.  Provide students with an online quiz that they are to complete before attending class for the day.  The quizzes can be graded electronically and the results sent to the professor, outlining which questions students struggled most with.  Then, class time can be used to address the areas that students are struggling with the most.  

Adapted from: Faculty Focus

Written By: Jessica Moser

Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Types of Test Questions

There are several different ways to pose questions that tests students’ knowledge.  Creating a solid exam means being able to determine what a student knows and is able to do by the time testing takes place.  Therefore, it is good to regularly review the advantages and disadvantages of the most commonly used tests questions and the test banks that are frequently used.

The most common forms of tests questions include: multiple-choice, true-false, short-answer, essay, and questions provided by test banks.  If you’ve used any of these types of test questions in your courses, consider what the benefits and downfalls of including each type are.  For more information on the advantages and disadvantages of each type, read this article from an issue of Faculty Focus by none other than Maryellen Weimer.

Written By: Jessica Moser

Helping Students Who are Performing Poorly

I recently stumbled across an article in Faculty Focus that proved to be an interesting read on how to help students who perform below average in your courses.  The author of this piece, the fabulous Maryellen Weimer, sheds some light on how to help those students who struggle in courses to become better learners and more active participants in learning.

She writes, “Unfortunately, all too often performance on the first exam predicts performance throughout the course, especially for those students who do poorly on the first test.”  This is then followed by a large variety of attempts to help those struggling students by providing opportunities for tutoring, office hours, study groups, review sessions, and more.  Although these opportunities seem like a great way to offer students extra help, often times the students who need the assistance the most are the ones who choose not to come.

Dr. Weimer proceeds to discuss the ways in which studies have shown direct communication between professors and struggling students paired with a request for students to speak with them directly outside of class provided a much needed boost in student comprehension, attention, and motivation in the course.  Students who attended these one-on-one meeting with their professors spent time talking through their performance in the course, working on goals they’d like to achieve within the course, and developing changes to implement in how and what they were studying.

These meetings tended to lead to large increases in test scores from their first to second exams, sometimes with percentage jumps as large as three letter grades.

To learn more about this process and the steps taken to help students succeed, click here.

Written By: Jessica Moser

Benefits of Using Rubrics

Though more commonly used in K-12 classes, rubrics can work as a fantastic form of communication between student and teacher.  When rubrics are utilized for a course, students need only to glance at their rubric for an assignment for expectations and specific components of focus for an assignment.

Why use rubrics?

Firstly, rubrics help instructors do a plethora of things within their courses including remaining consistent in their assessment of assignments between students, provide feedback that promotes student learning in a sustainable way, and clarifying expectations of an assignment for students.  Some instructors have even found that rubrics help save them time when grading large amounts of work, since the grading criteria remains the same throughout.  These instructors still spend time writing comments, but they are then also able to return to the scale their rubrics are set on in order to grade more efficiently.

Secondly, rubrics also help students.  Providing students with a copy of a rubric before they being completing an assignment will help them understand overall expectations for their work, and will make note of specific components that are listed on their rubrics.  Students are also more likely to become aware of their learning process and the progress that they make throughout the class by utilizing the feedback received on rubrics to improve in the future.

How can you develop a rubric?

There are several different types of rubrics that you can choose to employ within your classroom depending on which one works best for the work you’re assigning.  If you’re new to rubrics, start small by creating one rubric for one assignment in a semester.  This will allow you to test the waters and see if rubrics work well for you within your own courses.  It may also be beneficial to ask colleagues if they have developed rubrics for similar assignments, just to get an idea of what sort of rubrics might be the most helpful. 

When creating a rubric, consider how you would outline the elements or critical attributes that will be evaluated for the assignment.  Then work on creating an evaluative range for performance quality underneath each element.  Leave comment boxes next to each section of the rubric for optional comments on specific components or to reference students back to a particular section of their work.  From there, all that’s left is to assign a numerical scale to each level.  Be sure to provide students with a copy during class and walk through the components together, asking for questions along the way.

For those of you who would rather type your comments, consider making your rubric into a fill-able PDF that can easily be sent out to students.

Adapted from: Cornell University CTE

Written by: Jessica Moser 

Why Frequent Exams are Better

Implementing exams throughout courses is a necessary evil, and it has been widely accepted by students and instructors alike that the times of midterms and finals are times of panic and disarray.  However, this anxiety might be less about the fact that students are required to take a test and more about the lack of test-taking they’ve experienced previously in the class.

In 2007, a study was completed in which a control group was set to have students only complete two midterm exams and a cumulative final throughout the semester.  This was in turn compared to an experimental group that required the completion of biweekly exams (six in total) as well as the same cumulative final as the control group.  The findings from this study proved very interesting indeed.

Students a part of the experimental group with biweekly exams scored, on average, about 10 percentage points (or one letter grade) higher on exams throughout the semester.  Plus, they scored about 15 percentage points higher on the final than students in the control group.

This wasn’t the only thing that had shown to be different between these two groups.  The control group experienced a decline in student enrollment when more than 11 percent of the students withdrew from the course.  Not a single student withdrew from the experimental section.  The improvement frequent exams made on the course was also seen in course ratings, as students who were a part of the experimental group rated the course and instructor higher overall in each.  In fact, 71 percent of students in the control group rated their instructor as “one of the best” they’ve had, vs. just a 36% rating from the control group.  (Note that both of these courses were taught by the same professor.)

So why was so much improvement seen between these two groups?  What is it about frequent exams that make the class more valuable to students?

Students are consistently exposed to information.  This paired with less material to learn at a time for the biweekly exams helped contribute to overall retention and understanding of course material.  This also amounted to receiving feedback more frequently and earlier on in the semester, allowing students to gauge what they should change about their learning habits in order to improve their scores.

Tip Provided By: Jessica Moser

Myers, C.B., and Myers, S.M. (2007). Assessing assessments: The effects of two exam formats on course achievement and evaluation. Innovative Higher Education, 31, 227–236.