Saturday Strategies: Low-Stakes Quizzing

As we finalize our syllabi for the start of the new semester, let’s talk about a quick strategy that can really change how you and your students view the learning experience in a course: consider using a low-stakes quizzing strategy.

Often times we use quizzes to ensure students are reading and understanding the basic content before we discuss it in the classroom or use it in online assignments.  Perhaps you have students complete a quiz before attending a F2F course, or perhaps you have one each week for an online course.  Quizzes provide very helpful feedback to the instructor—if we write the questions carefully, we can see exactly where students did or did not make the connections or missed important components of a topic.  That information in turn allows us to adapt the learning materials, class discussion, or other activities to bridge that misunderstanding or confusion.

Something that I see faculty do less often is to allow students that same quiz to be an opportunity for student meta-cognitive growth.  If we allow students to view those quizzes, see what they may have missed, and review before retaking the quiz, we increase the opportunities for students to evaluate their self-mastery of the content and see what they may not fully understand yet.  Even better, if we provide direct feedback for each question, anticipating common mistakes or referring students back to a particular passage in the text, we can help them see how to improve their study habits and fill-in gaps in their own learning and understanding processes.

Essentially, if we let go of trying to use the quizzes simply for a grade or assessment of content knowledge, we can turn them into a true learning tool for both students and instructors.

This low-stakes quizzing strategy only requires instructors to re-frame how we think about the role of the quiz in our courses.  If we allow students to retake the quizzes 2 or perhaps 3 times, students can focus on learning from their mistakes and improving.  With each quiz worth minimal points, or even graded collectively or based on a general proficiency rate, we remove the pressure and stress on students to do well on the quizzes and allow them to focus on the learning.  Instructors can even make these smaller self-review quizzes not part of the course grade at all, depending on how you choose to assess that content knowledge with other assessments and rubrics in the course.  When students complete the reading and quizzes outside of class via an LMS or even through Google Forms and quizzes you build yourself, it facilitates the flipped classroom model of using class time for applying the content to discussions, projects, and problem solving exercises.

In my classes, students can take the all the quizzes up to two times, and ultimately the quizzes are worth roughly 10 percent of the final course grade.  Combined with other best practices that many of us already do—like providing specific, measurable feedback early and often in the semester on the other assignments and assessments—this low-stakes quizzing strategy further builds confidence among students.  They end up exploring the content in more detail to understand what they missed, and they practice reviewing and using the content knowledge over the course of several quiz attempts (making it harder to memorize and then dump the information by cramming).  

Each semester my student evaluations support the impact this strategy has made in students’ learning experience.  Students consistently appreciate the focus on learning the material as opposed to just taking the quiz and passing or failing without much recourse.  They comment on how it encouraged them to reflect on what they did or did not yet know and adjust their study strategies, leading to more engagement with the course in general and higher satisfaction with their performance and the course overall.

This is a simple change, but one that can really impact how students approach a course and their role in the learning process.