Staff writer
One of the most difficult things about being a teacher is deciding when students need to work on a lesson a second or third time.
Tests and quizzes are the barometer for students’ knowledge, but teachers only have so much time during the school year and need to cover all material in the curriculum. Writing and then grading a quiz is a time-consuming process and would be negated if the test showed students understood the material.
Marion Middle School might have the solution.
MMS English teacher Michael Ayers has been giving his seventh and eighth-grade classes electronic quizzes. Students answer quiz questions as they appear on a projector screen. The quiz is created on Ayers’ laptop. Each student uses a small hand-held wireless clicker or remote to select answers electronically.
Technology Excellence in Education Network coordinator Brandi Hendrix arranged for the set of 32 clickers to go to MMS.
Ayers gave an eighth-grade class a quiz of 10 multiple-choice questions on figurative language Oct. 20.
Students had a time limit to answer questions. The quizzes are interactive and immediate — one student, after selecting the right answer, jumped out of his seat and raised his arms in the air in celebration — but usually confidential. Students do not know how other students answered — but Ayers knows based on the clicker number. He has instant feedback to understand which students are struggling with particular sections of the material.
“You’ll get the best data back from multiple choice,” Ayers said. “It’s all automatically imported on a laptop. I’m not wasting time by not assuming they know something.”
Example electronic quizzes were part of the package with Marion Middle School’s social studies textbooks and Chad Adkins has used the clickers in his classroom, but Ayers has created all of the questions on his quizzes. After this year, the quizzes can be reused for a few years before the answers are known.
One of the main advantages of electronic quizzes is it can illuminate confusing questions. After every student answers, Ayers knows the percentage of the class that answered the question correctly. He was able to put that information into a graph he showed his class Oct. 20. If a large percentage of students miss a question, ambiguous or tricky wording might be the reason. When that situation occurs, Ayers can strike the question from the test.
“Clearly, it’s a bad question,” Ayers said. “That’s hard to see if you’re grading by hand.”
The electronic quiz supplemented a written quiz and the clicker quizzes are limited to multiple choice and true/false questions. One question on Ayers’ written test had students write a poem using a metaphor, an exercise that would be impossible using clickers.
Ayers and Adkins are already using the electronic quizzes and math teacher Bill Darrow wants to use clickers for multiple choice math questions.
“I think it’s going to take a little time,” Ayers said. “I hope that it will pay off down the road.”