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 ...