Daily Quizzes

In classes that require significant retention of knowledge, a daily quiz can help students learn and retain the information. Before audience response systems were widely available, a method of administering a daily (every class period) quiz was developed that reduced the workload on the instructor. This method is no longer used, since audience response systems are much more accessible. However for classes where an audience response system isn't warranted the process outlined here may help.

The concept of the daily quiz is to see if students are staying current in the class. In any class were reading before coming to class is expected, the daily quiz can make sure the student has read the material and will therefore get more out of the discussion in the class. In many engineering classes that do not require reading, the daily quiz can be a way to make sure the students understand the fundamental concepts and will not get lost before diving into more detailed examples. Once again, this process has been superseded by digital audience response systems, but the concepts still hold.

My goals for the daily quiz were 1) it could not take up much time out of the class period, 2) it could not take a long time to grade, 3) it should help students by highlighting important topics and encouraging them to review critical material.

The final process for the daily quiz was the following:

• It is multiple choice with 6 questions
• Each question is worth one point
• The total score is for the quiz is 5 points, this means the student could miss one question and not lose any points
• The lowest quiz score was dropped, this helped ease the concern of missing one quiz
• The questions were put into PowerPoint slides, one question per slide
• Each question was shown for 45 seconds on the screen and then the slide would advance automatically to the next question
• After all 6 questions were shown, each question would be shown a second time for 15 seconds. Resulting in a full minute for each question
• The background color of each slide was very different from the previous slide, this was used to highlight the fact that the question had changed.
• Students provided their answers on a single answer sheet that was collected, graded, and handed back out to the students before the next quiz
• Grades for the quizzes were recorded after about 10 or so class periods.

Using the above process, taking the daily quiz took about 8 minutes out of the lecture time for a class of about 40 students. About a minute and a half or so to hand out the answer sheets and about 30 seconds to collect the answer sheets along with the 6 minutes for the actual quiz. Grading the answers was relatively quick since the answer sheet forced the students to write their answers in the same location, so it was a matter of scanning the answer sheet quickly and marking the missed problems. Recording the grades occasionaly also reduced the time associated with this process. By waiting to record the grades for a student all at once, it became a task of filling in one row in the gradebook while looking over the answer sheet.

Once again the above process has been superseded with digital audience response systems that does all of the collecting, grading and recording instantaneously, but this process is still useful for courses that do not use audience response systems.