End of topic tests

After a topic has been taught, or at regular intervals throughout the course, teachers often set tests for their students. These are used to decide the next steps in learning, known as formative assessment and to provide a snapshot of attainment and progress known as summative assessment.

How Smart Revise can be used to create end of topic tests

Tasks

Tasks is perfect for setting end of topic tests because it includes exam style questions that can be easily configured by the teacher.

Question selection is automatic saving teachers time because they don’t need to do any additional preparation for the test other than following a simple task creation wizard. An end of topic test can be set in less than 3 minutes.

With self and peer marking options the teacher can also avoid lots of marking if they choose to.

A teacher can:

Use Tasks to create a new test or copy an existing test.
Choose the topics to include in the test.
Choose the number and type of questions to be selected.
Set availability dates, deadlines and automatic submission.
Choose who will mark the task: teacher, student or a peer.
Select which students to assign the test to.

A student can:

See the task on their course dashboard.
Answer the questions one at a time.
Mark their work or the work of a peer if self or peer assessment has been chosen.
Review their marks and feedback in their mark book.

After the assessment, a teacher can:

Review self and peer marking.
Leave written feedback against individual questions or the whole test.
Automatically collate marks in a downloadable markbook.
Compare assessments as percentages are recorded in addition to the total number of marks.
Analyse student performace with reports.

The research

Monthly review is one of the Rosenshine principles. The effort involved in recalling recently-learned material embeds it in long-term memory. The more this happens, the easier it is to connect new material to prior knowledge.

Conducting monthly reviews of everything that has been learned so far, or end of topic tests allows the teacher to assess how well a topic has been taught, how much has been learned and identify misconceptions.

The International Academy of Education, 21(2010). Rosenshine, B. (2012) Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know. American Educator, 36(1), p12-39.

Select the experience you want for your students

Tasks can include multiple-choice questions that are marked automatically; Terms questions that ask the students to write definitions to subject specific terms and Advance questions that require extended written answers. So called, “level of response” or “chained response” questions are also included in Smart Revise. Those are questions marked in assessment objective bands instead of a mark per point made.

Smart Revise is different

Most applications and websites provide students with the same number and the same set of questions in an end of topic test. Smart Revise is different because it will select new random questions each time a task is created. The teacher can also choose the number of questions they require with an indication of the time the test will take students. Ideal for fitting a test into a whole lesson.

The teacher can clone tasks if they want to set the same questions for multiple classes or conduct resit assessments. They can also swap out questions to make more bespoke and tailored assessments.