Whether for classroom grading purposes or state assessment, many students dread taking tests. Some students' performance can suffer due to test anxiety. So how can we combat this? How can we reduce fear and make the tests useful for students?
The answer may seem counterintuitive, so bear with me: Quiz more often. I am referring to very short (roughly five questions), daily or weekly quizzes, given in the first 10 minutes of class. These short quizzes serve several purposes and can help students in many ways. When administered at the beginning of every class, quizzes provide structure, help students settle, and put them in the right mindset for class. Quizzes give students a low-pressure way of seeing where they stand by allowing them to identify potential misconceptions and track their progress over the school year or semester. With repeated, low-stress quizzes, the act of testing becomes a bit more regular, and some research (Agarwal, D'Antonio, Roediger III, McDermott, & McDaniel, 2014) has shown that routine, short quizzes can reduce test anxiety.
How It Works
For this frequent quizzing to work, four key criteria must be met.
- Emphasize practice: These quizzes are meant not to significantly affect a student's grade but rather to act as low-pressure practice. Students are aware from the beginning that the quizzes make up a small portion of the total course grade and that each student's lowest (or two lowest) scores are dropped at the end of the semester. These features remove pressure from the quizzes—a bad score one day, or several days, is not the end of the world—and can help remove the overall stress many students have during bigger tests.
- Fast-track feedback: You can either (1) grade the quizzes the night after class and return them the next day, going over the top three or so problems that most students got wrong, or (2) let students grade their own papers immediately after taking the quiz. The latter option relies on students' honesty, but if you emphasize that this is meant to help them learn, not to affect their grade, they should be more likely to honestly score their own work.
- Repeat quiz content: I suggest repeating certain items throughout the semester—specifically, the ones that many students get wrong the first time. This not only helps to "hammer out" misconceptions and make sure the students are retaining information, but also allows students to track their progress on certain topics or concepts.
- Make it routine: These quizzes should be a source of consistency and structure for the students. In other words, they should not be "pop quizzes." Pop quizzes add stress and defeat the purpose of these quizzes, which is to help the students learn, not to grade the depth of their understanding.
Question Formats, Levels, and Sources
Now that you have the guidelines for administering these regular, low-stakes practice quizzes, what should be the content? Open-ended questions are often preferable in terms of student learning and are particularly useful for discovering student misconceptions. For larger classrooms, it may be more feasible to include a mix of open-ended and closed-ended (multiple choice) items. One way to do this is to first ask the question in an open-ended format requiring a relatively short response; then present it as a multiple choice question in future quizzes. You can create the alternative (incorrect) answers from incorrect responses you saw in students' original open-ended responses. This also helps to identify common misconceptions and strengthens the students' ability to discriminate between fully and partially correct responses. Lastly, testing students in both formats (open and closed ended) or rephrasing the questions in future iterations offers variability and prevents students from relying on memorizing a specific answer rather than understanding the question or concept.
Another way to add variety to the quizzes is to ask different levels of questions. Should the questions be based solely on a text? Should they be fact-based or more applied? This depends on what subject you are teaching and what types of questions you want or need your students to be able to answer. I prefer to give students a mixture of both factual and applied questions. For example, in a science class, questions might include a definition (Q: Which component of the circulatory system acts as a pump? A: the heart) and one that requires applied knowledge or deeper reasoning (Q: Why can't blood flow directly from the lungs to the rest of the body? A: because it needs the muscles in the heart to pump it through the body, or because the lungs don't have muscles to force movement through the body).
If your students have enough time and understanding of the material, they can create their own questions. You can then use some of those questions in future quizzes. This has two benefits: First, it offers motivation for your students to see their questions in the quizzes ("Hey, that's my question!"). Second, it offers an additional opportunity for students to generate their own questions and answers. Often, we think we know something until we really dig deep and ask thoughtful questions. By creating their own questions, students get to know what they don't know and chart their own course to authentic understanding.
Students want regular challenges, not fear and anxiety, in the classroom. Brief, low-stakes, and focused quizzes give them a chance to demonstrate learning while building the knowledge and confidence to be successful in the main event.