Category: Other stuff

Student quizzing sites like Plickers and Quizizz are proving extremely useful for engagement and AfL this lockdown. One of the nice things about Quizizz is the volume of pre-made quizzes, but I usually find I want to tweak them for a few of reasons:

1. I want to ensure my questions helpfully inform me about student understanding, not how good they are at picking obvious answers.
2. I want a steady increase in difficulty. My general aim is that a class will achieve 70% accuracy in a quiz (an arbitrary threshold for not too difficult, not too easy). I want early recall questions to give the students a feeling of success in their knowledge, but I want the final questions to probe their understanding.
3. I’ve found that running the same quiz at the beginning and end of a lesson helps the students see and enjoy their progress, but this approach definitely requires shorter quizzes than I was using originally.

Learning as I go along, my quiz collection more consistently applies the above three principles as it grows. Regardless, if you are interested in using Quizizz, I hope it will be a useful starting point:

MNicoll – Quizizz Collections

This post provides a permanent link to two work-in-progress documents listing student misconceptions in biology, chemistry and physics. Both are collations of previously-published information (citations in each) and personal experience.

I plan to periodically update these links with the most current versions, but they should be useful as-is.