5 reasons to stop giving traditional quizzes in school
 |
| via quotesbuddy.com |
When I converted my class to a Results Only Learning Environment, I eliminated all testing, including quizzes. Here are five reasons that I stopped giving traditional quizzes.
- Most quizzes are made up of multiple choice items, which provide inaccurate results, because you never really know when a student guesses.
- Many students simply don't test well, so they may know the material but get the quiz questions wrong.
- There are many activities that engage students and are conducive to formative assessment, which is far less threatening than a quiz and provides much better feedback.
- Quizzes create anxiety and tend to hurt students' grades.
- If the goal is to check for learning, why not use a tool like Socrative, which will give you a good pulse of what students know, without punishing them with a punitive grade.
Mark Barnes is an education author and consultant and the publisher of Brilliant or Insane. Learn more about Mark on our Team page. Follow him on Twitter here.
This would be a helpful post if it did not mention Socrative as an option. How is Socrative much better than a quiz, though it might reduce anxiety? It is still comparable to a multiple choice quiz item, which you have already derided as not an effective way to assess learning.
ReplyDeleteActually, Judy, Socrative is much more than a simple quizzing tool. Socrative provides a written response option, a graphic option and an exit ticket -- all wonderful for formative assessment and feedback. Plus, Socrative can be set up to supply instant feedback to the students on their responses.
DeleteThanks for weighing in on this.