Using quizzes and questionnaires makes your teaching more interactive, and the students have an opportunity to respond using a digital tool during a lecture. You may also use quizzes and questionnaires in activities between sessions, asking the students to answer some questions either before or after teaching sessions.
Quizzes and questionnaires give you as a teacher an opportunity to detect patterns in student responses, which gives you an idea of their pre-understanding of a topic, their current learning or their opinions. You can use this when planning your teaching and giving current feedback or for revising academic material based on student responses.
By using interactive teaching during lecturing, you can involve the students actively in the academic material or create a good basis for an academic discussion, as diverse perceptions or subject-related misunderstandings are discovered.
You may use online quizzes, tests or student response systems (e.g. Mentimeter), which enable students to become active during your lecture. Using tests is easiest in activities between sessions.
By answering quizzes and tests during your teaching, the students may discover if they have understood the material correctly. This tells them what they have learnt and gives you an opportunity to comment and give feedback on the students’ current understanding of the academic material. You as a teacher also discover the students’ learning needs and possible subject-related misunderstandings, enabling you to adapt your teaching accordingly.
By using quizzes and questionnaires in your teaching you create a basis for academic discussion and encourage students to ask questions during teaching. You invite your students into a more inclusive and dialogical teaching space in which they are welcome to voice their opinion.
By asking the students questions regarding material or data they do not yet know, you invite them to reflect on their own expectations and understanding. This creates greater awareness of the actual result and an opportunity to compare class responses with the actual result or with their responses after the topic has been taught.
When students engage in interactive teaching and are asked to reflect on an academic topic and compare their own understanding of this to the understanding of their fellow students, they may discover what they have understood correctly and what they need to study in more detail. This enables self-regulated learning.
If you do not know which tools to use for the different activities, or what the differences are between them, you may read more about tools below:
Mentimeter is an online voting system that can be used during lectures. The teacher prepares the questions, and the students can access these online on their computer or smartphone. Voting results are accessible straight away and may be displayed using many different types of diagrams or tables.
H5P is a tool that allows you to create various types o
Not all questions are equally suitable for students to answer in multiple choice surveys. You should therefore consider if the topic of the day is “quizzable”.
Consider if interactive teaching should be a standard element in a series of lectures. For instance as a 10-minute revision at the end of each lecture.
Please contact the editors at AU Educate if you have any questions about the content of the platform or if you need consultation on your teaching from one of the many skilled professionals at the Centre for Educational Development.
