Low stakes quizzing
Recall activities at the start of every lesson are becoming a feature in many schools. It’s not surprising because revising facts from previous lessons can have a big impact on knowledge retention and attainment. In many schools the teacher will decide ten questions in advance of the lesson to post on the board for students to consider when they enter the classroom. So called, “engagement on entry”.
While this is effective, wouldn’t it be more effective if those ten questions were differentiated for every student? If those ten questions were from all the topics taught so far, not just the last lesson? If those ten questions were an infinite number so that all students remain on task until the teacher is ready to start the next phase of the lesson? Smart Quiz does this for you! Automatically interleaving questions from topics taught so far!
Using Smart Quiz consistently both at the start of a lesson and for homework has proven to help beat the forgetting curve; the decline in memory retention over time.
How to use Smart Revise for low stakes quizzing
Option 1: Smart Quiz
Ideal if you want students to compete against each other and have a personalised set of never-ending questions.
Step 1: Enable Quiz and set the topic filters
Make sure Quiz is enabled in the class settings.
It is important that the teacher controls the topic filtering and selects all the topics that have been taught so far, not the topic currently being worked on. Remember the goal is to beat the forgetting curve, not assess the most recently gained knowledge.
Step 2: Tell students to work on Quiz for 7 minutes at the beginning of the lesson
It might seem odd, but if you give students a number that is not 5 or 10 it feels like this part of the lesson is planned!
Smart Quiz will personalise the never-ending question set for each student. Just stop the students working when you are ready to continue the lesson.
Step 3: Use the analytics reports to check how many questions were answered
Use the Quiz – Analytics – Usage report and set the date filter to Today to see the number of questions answered. You could also share the Leaderboard with the class too.
Option 2: Smart Tasks
Ideal if you want students to all have the same questions, complete the same number of questions and record the marks.
Step 1: Set a task
Create a new task with the following settings:
- Topics: select only those topics that have been taught so far, not the topic currently being worked on. Remember the goal is to beat the forgetting curve, not assess the most recently gained knowledge.
- Experience: select 10 Quiz questions only.
- Schedule: no deadline for submission. There is no need to set the task availability, it will default to immediately available.
- Students: untick any students that are absent.
Step 2: Mark the task
As this task only contains quiz questions it can be committed to the mark book immediately.
- In the Active Tasks panel, select Mark.
- Select Commit to mark book.