This past semester, I decided to do something crazy\u2014I gave my students a quiz (nearly) every day of class. You can imagine that my students weren’t nearly as excited as I was about this plan. In case you’re looking for a way to shake things up in your classroom, I want to share the good, the bad, and the ugly about my daily quiz system over my\u00a0next two posts.To set the scene, I taught a Calculus I course in the spring that met with me four days a week and with a TA once a week. Here is a quick breakdown of the division of responsibilities: the TA handles all of the written homework and project grading, the students have online homework that is graded instantly, there are several midterm exams and a final that we grade together, and there is a weekly quiz written and graded by me as the instructor. This is all to say that within this system, I had a hard time figuring out exactly where my students were excelling and struggling because I didn\u2019t look carefully at enough of their work. There are many small things that one can do to fix such an issue but here’s one big thing that I tried.<\/p>\n
My solution: give a one or two question quiz at the start of each class period written\u00a0to take around\u00a0five minutes or maybe a little longer depending on the day.<\/p>\n
The Good:<\/p>\n
These outcomes paint a pretty picture about giving daily quizzes but there were plenty of drawbacks that came along for the ride. In my next post, I\u2019ll go through some of the bad and the ugly parts of my daily quiz implementation. Stay tuned!<\/p>\n