2 Quizzes
A quiz is a game that needs a little more advance preparation than ones like ‘Splat’ and ‘What Am I?’ For a quiz to work well, the questions and answers need to be produced and checked beforehand.
The main advantage of using a quiz is that by providing the correct answers afterwards, your students can learn from any mistakes they make. You can easily adjust the challenge of the quiz by:
- giving your students more or less time
- giving them more or fewer questions
- changing the group size.
The most important thing to remember when planning a quiz is that all the questions need to be closed and have short answers. Closed questions are questions where there is only one definite right answer. This is to avoid any confusion for your students over other possible correct answers when they are doing the quiz. The questions themselves can be long (ideally not too long or complicated so that your students can access them quickly) but you want the student to be able to give a short rather than extended answer.
When you are planning quiz questions, also think of these four key factors:
- level of difficulty
- pace
- coverage of the topic
- variety.
So, in summary, good class quizzes have the following characteristics:
- All the questions can only be answered correctly with a brief and particular response.
- There should be a mixture of hard and easy questions.
- Each question doesn’t take too long to answer.
- Each question concentrates on a different part of the science topic, but overall a sensible amount of science is tested.
- There are different types of questions, including ‘true or false’ questions and multiple choice questions.
- There are not too many questions in total, so that the quiz is quick and concise.
Activity 2: ‘10–4–10’, planning a simple quiz on the trends in the Periodic Table
This activity will help you to prepare and carry out a short quiz on the trends in the modern Periodic Table with your class. The aim here is to create ten quiz questions that can be answered in ten minutes following the rules above – hence the name of the quiz, ‘10–4–10’.
Read the Class X textbook section on the trends in the modern Periodic Table. What kinds of questions does it ask? Do you think your students would be able to answer these questions well in a quiz situation?
Make a list of the questions in the textbook that you think could be easily adapted as good quiz questions. If possible, work with another science teacher to adapt the questions on your list into good quiz questions. Supplement your quiz with new questions of your own to make ten questions.
With your colleague, create the answer sheet for the quiz. Give the quiz to another colleague to test it out. Use the feedback from your second colleague to make any alterations to the questions.
Use your quiz with Class X. You could divide them into two teams and ask alternate questions, or you could set it up like a television quiz show.
Note carefully the questions that your students did not answer correctly. How will you improve their understanding in these areas?
1 Very simple games