Case Study: Emma Smith

The Study

The study was a trial for the Institute of Effective Education looking at the effectiveness of low-stakes quizzes in year 8 geography and history classes.

Methods

Once a week, half of the classes sat a quick, ten-question quiz at the start of their lesson before being given the answers so that they could mark their own work.

Methods (cont.)

At the end of the year, all pupils in year 8 sat an assessment, and we compared how they did with their first assessment of the year.

Methods (cont.)

In doing this, we could examine how those pupils in the classes who completed the quizzes compared to those whose classes did not.

Results

Everyone benefited to some extent from the quizzes, but the effect was greater in the geography classes than in the history classes.
This possibly happened because the geography questions were often a little more complex than the history ones and needed the pupils to draw on a wider body of knowledge to answer them.
Thus, the geography questions were more generative in nature, requiring pupils to go through that process of selection, organisation and integration.

Application

This study has helped to shape how Emma & Mark's school uses self-testing, with advice to staff to think carefully about how they approach question selection in their retrieval quizzes and give thought to whether the questions require pupils to think hard about the material to be learned.

1Introduction

1.1From Teaching to Learning

1.1.1Context in the Education Landscape 1

1.1.2Context in the Education Landscape 2

2Summarising

2.1Learning by Summarising

2.1.1What is a Summary?

2.1.2Learn by Summarising

2.1.3Summarisation at Work

2.1.4Case Study: Adam Riches

3Self-Testing

3.1Learning by Self-Testing

3.1.1Learning by Self-Testing

3.1.2Case Study: Emma Smith

4Self-Explaining

4.1Learning by Self-Explaining

4.1.1Learning by Self-Explaining

4.1.2Case Study: Ceridwen Eccles

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