The origin of the term is also its purpose: A pop quiz asks what a student actually remembers, not what was crammed into short-term memory in the moments before the bell. A pop quiz reveals what is internalized.
Except when it doesn’t. In my experience, pop quizzes don’t work. They operate on fear and anxiety, which undermine knowledge and skill. Quizzes require obfuscation and subterfuge on the part of the teacher, too, resulting in a kind of arms race between student gamesmanship and real learning.
What I did with that realization is here:
The first two paragraphs are mostly the same as the start of this post; the rest of that Medium essay explores what pop quizzes do and how we might reimagine them.
Data-Driven Quizzes
In a makerspace, the goal of a quiz would be to gather data that lets us direct instruction and learning. For example, during a unit on narrative writing and literary analysis in English 11, we needed to test students’ understanding of literary devices. That led to this quiz:
The directions are repeated at the start of the Google Form, too, for the sake of a kind of engineering redundancy:
DDQ: Literary Devices (1)
Complete the following quiz without using any additional online or offline resources. Match the term to the definition. Identify what you have internalized. Then use the resources of the makerspace to make sense of your performance. Submit evidence of that metacognitive insight as indicated elsewhere.
Terms and definitions: https://blog.prepscholar.com/list-of-literary-devices-techniques
Header image: https://dribbble.com/shots/5330302-Creativity-Book-Club
The focus is on how students learn, not a quiz score. The scores help students self-assess their needs and advocate for their roles in a different and often better form of feedback.
In this example, the questions were simple enough: given the literary device, match it to the definition. For each term, all 19 definitions (we cut it down from the 24 suggested in the instructional post) were randomized, which forced a basic kind of repetition. Here is the start of the choices for verbal irony:
In a quiz like this, each question is instructional, and determining the correct answer is about learning, not performance. On my end, I am able to look at real-time data like these:
That screenshot is illustrative of the process. One tab is open to an instructional post; another, to this quiz and its data. For each question, I am able to see what students seem to know. Irony, for instance, is a difficult concept; perhaps these students need a lesson in irony, then, or a model text that demonstrates verbal irony. I’ll know the answer when I read their metacognitive analysis of the quiz.
Moving Forward
That’s an explanation of the pedagogy. For students, it’s now a question of efficacy: Does this help you to internalize information? Does it make your learning habits more transparent? How does your performance improve as a result of this kind of reimagined quiz? Use the comment space here to ask questions and offer insights — including any onomatopoeia that might replace “pop” with a better metaphor.