Low stakes quizzing
Recall activities at the start of every lesson are a feature in many high performing schools. It’s not surprising because revising facts from previous lessons can have a big impact on knowledge retention and attainment. The teacher decides 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?
Quiz
Smart Revise Quiz selects, spaces and interleaves questions from topics taught so far automatically with no work for the teacher. Quiz is always ready when you are. There is nothing to do to set up a low stakes quiz. Students simply select Quiz from their course dashboard.
A teacher can:
The research
Daily review is one of the ten Rosenshine principles. By beginning each lesson with a short review of previous learning, daily review can strengthen previous learning and can lead to fluent recall.
Diagnostic multiple choice questions can be used to identify misconceptions easily. For example:
What is 5 + 5?
Diagnostic answers would include 0 (the student used subtraction), 1 (the student used division), 25 (the student used multiplication) and 10 (the student understands that the + symbol means addition).
Regular low stakes quizzing is also excellent for addressing the forgetting curve, helping students to retain more knowledge over a longer period of time.
Rosenshine, B. (2012) Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know. American Educator, 36(1), p12-39.
Murre, J., Dros, J. (2015) Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve
A student can:
Tasks
If a teacher wants all students in the class to attempt the same questions, they can set a task that just contains multiple choice questions.
Tasks that only contain multiple choice questions are automatically marked with marks being recorded in a mark book.
Reports can be used to analyse the data from individual tasks.