Pop Quizzes! Why?

Why pop quizzes? That is a great question! My purpose for any assessment, particularly quizzes, is to see how students are progressing with course content. Since quizzes are given “midstream”, while students are still learning, they act as a dipstick, a measure of what is “sticking” and what still requires additional teaching and learning. Pop quizzes give an accurate indication of what is actually in the student’s long-term memory because the student does not get a chance to “refresh” their memory before taking the quiz. This way, I get to see how well they have actually learned the material, not how well they crammed it into their temporary memory before the quiz! If a quiz doesn’t act as a “dipstick” to provide a information on what a student actually knows, then what good is it?

According to brain research, when something is initially learned, it moves into a person’s working memory, or temporary memory. While this temporary storage may hold the information for anywhere from minutes to days (depending on how interested or motivated the learner is to comprehend it), it is merely temporary, and like the memory of a car across from you at a red light this morning, it will fade from your memory.

But we want our students to learn and remember the information for a lifetime! Research confirms that this will occur when the information both makes sense and has meaning to the learner. So, the goal of any good lesson is to ensure that new content makes sense, and even more importantly, has meaning to our students! There is a catch, this move from temporary to long-term storage takes time. Research confirms that this process occurs during deep sleep. So, according to researcher Dr. David Sousa (2006), “If a learner cannot recall new learning after 24 hours, there is a high probability that it was not permanently stored, and thus, can never be recalled” (p. 51).

These quizzes are not punishment! While I hope that everyone does well on them, which truly indicates learning, I expect them to help surface misconceptions. As a result, I will only officially grade a small (but unannounced) portion of these quizzes. Sometimes only certain questions will count; other times entire quizzes will be dropped. When quizzes do count, they will ordinarily be only 15 to 35 points each, small compared to exams (45-110 points) or WebAssigns (40-80 points).

Resource:

Sousa, D. (2006). How the brain learns (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.