Some final thoughts on adding in-class quizzes to my course on economic development:
For six of the nine quizzes administered so far, students answered only half of the questions correctly. Given the results of my survey on students’ study habits, I am increasingly convinced that the problem of transfer is contributing to their poor performance. Perhaps I should create a series of real world-based practice exercises for next year’s iteration of this course. These exercises could be an additional connection to the reading assignments.
Even though each quiz has a maximum of four questions, the quiz-taking eats up a significant amount of classroom time. Perhaps I should impose a time limit. If I put the quizzes online for completion outside of class, students will be able to search for correct answers, which defeats my purpose of testing recall to strengthen memory.
The quizzes have helped me identify what students still don’t know. Reviewing questions in class after grading each quiz might have helped students better understand the concepts that they had been tested on. But the final exam that I created for the course (Part 8 below) will allow me to only indirectly infer whether this occurred. Maybe next year I should repeat some of the same questions across multiple quizzes, or introduce summative exams, to get a better idea of whether students are in fact learning what they are being quizzed about.
Links to the original series on redesigning this course:
http://www.epsteineducation.com/home/about/
Interesting ‘technology’ to integrate quizzes into active learning.