The “testing effect,” as it’s called by cognitive psychologists, seems pretty obvious to faculty. If students are going to be tested on material, they will learn it better and retain it longer than if they just study the material. And just in case you had
Good study skills are the key to successful performance on exams in college, and good study skills are what many of today’s college students don’t have. We can spend time pontificating about who bears the responsibility for these absent skills. We can philosophize about who
Multiple-choice tests don’t get much respect. Maybe it’s because they’re associated with memorization, old-fashioned standardized tests, and other situations in which the answer is likely to be “C.”
Yet when properly designed, multiple-choice tests can be a vital addition to your testing tool box. Outlined here
Most conventional assessment strategies provide limited opportunities for instructors to realign teaching methods and revisit topics that students have not understood well. Teachers can communicate with students individually, but time constraints may prevent multiple individual conversations. Some students in the classroom are reluctant to ask
Eleven years ago, I discovered a life-changing pedagogy called team-based learning. It let me do things in large classrooms that I didn’t think was possible. I found that the key to successful team-based learning was writing really good multiple-choice questions. I would like to look
Exam debriefs are typically that: brief. The tests are passed back, score ranges are revealed, and the teacher goes over the most missed questions, identifying and explaining the correct answer. There may be a chance for students to ask questions, but most sit passively. This
The relatively new Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology journal has a great feature called a “Teacher-Ready Research Review.” The examples I’ve read so far are well organized, clearly written, full of practical implications, and well referenced. This one on multiple-choice (m/c) tests (mostly
Decades of research on learning styles have resulted in widespread familiarity with the concept. Ask most students what kind of learners they are and they will often answer with a learning style descriptor—visual, verbal, kinesthetic, auditory, converger. Many will tell you they know because they’ve
Frequent quizzes encourage students to keep up with what’s happening in class. Quizzes motivate regular study and review. They give teachers a chance to correct students’ errors and misunderstandings. If they test students on key aspects of the content, they help students identify the content
With most instructional practices, it’s all about how they’re implemented. That’s what determines whether they’re right or wrong. Professor Tropman teaches introductory and upper division philosophy courses. She acknowledges that there are arguments against using reading quizzes, but writes, “I have had success using quizzes
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