Approximately once a week, the daily opener will be a Lightning Quiz. Lightning Quizzes consist of five multiple-choice questions about material we have recently covered or have covered in previous units but is relevant to upcoming material. Students will complete the Lightning Quizzes within four minutes. After the time has expired, the class will check the answers together with students self-grading their quizzes. In this debriefing period, we will cover both the reasoning behind the correct answers and some basic strategies for approaching multiple-choice questions when students are unsure of the correct answer. Gradually, students will build up a toolbox of strategies for dealing with multiple-choice questions. The Lightning Quizzes will be very lightly weighted, being worth the equivalent of only one days opener.
The purpose of lightning quizzes is to assess and reinforce students understandings of
background knowledge and to practice and refine students multiple-choice test taking skills. A large body of research has shown that multiple-choice test questions are not effective at eliciting or assessing historical reasoning skills, the ability to analyze and use evidence from sources, or the ability to build and support arguments, which are the primary skills I focus on in my curriculum. Multiple-choice tests tend to reinforce the approach to history as just a list of events, dates and people and to encourage the type of rote memorization that is not applicable to students lives now or in the future. Due to these short-falls with the multiple-choice format, the exams given in my class are made up entirely of short-answer and essay questions instead, which push students to analyze sources, think critically and build persuasive evidence-based arguments. However, multiple-choice tests are still a popular form of assessment in college courses and most importantly, on college entrance exams. Furthermore, research has shown that a large portion of success on multiple-choice exams can be attributed to test-wiseness, the ability to use knowledge and experience of the format itself to answer questions. Therefore, it is important for my students to be comfortable with multiple-choice questions and familiar with common test- wise strategies for approaching them. Hence, the Lightning Quizzes which can build students test-wiseness in a small, low-stakes way that avoids shifting the focus of their learning to the rote memorization encouraged by full, high-stakes multiple-choice exams. In addition, Lightning Quizzes give me an opportunity to assess the basic background knowledge of my students. I can then address important shortfalls that would prevent them from undertaking the higher-level thinking that is the focus of my lesson plans.
