WASHINGTON: Wondering how to upgrade your child’s performance in school, quizzing your younger one over study material might help.
According to a new-meta analysis, the students who are quizzed over class material at least once a week tend to perform better on the midterm and final exams compared to students who did not take quizzes.
The researchers found in addition to frequency, immediate feedback from instructors also seemed to positively impact student performance. About a year ago, a conversation during a faculty meeting piqued Marcus Crede’s interest.
A senior faculty member in Iowa State University’s Department of Psychology said that he believed frequent quizzes help students better grasp classroom material. Crede, an associate professor of psychology, was skeptical that something as simple as a quiz could positively impact students’ academic performance.
He decided to dig deeper and conduct a meta-analytic study of existing research to see if there was any merit to the claim. What he discovered truly surprised him.
“I have a long history of trying to understand the variables that contribute to learning and performance in the classroom,” Crede said. “For me, this study is part of a larger effort to understand what works and what doesn’t work.
It turned out to be a much more interesting paper than I thought it was going to be. I was surprised.”
The study’s results are detailed in the paper, “Regarding Class Quizzes: A Meta-analytic Synthesis of Studies on the Relationship Between Frequent Low-stakes Testing and Class Performance,” published last month in the journal Educational Psychology Review.
Crede teamed up with psychology graduate student Lukas Sotola, who took the lead on much of the research. They analyzed data from previously published studies that examined 52 classes with almost 8,000 students, primarily college-level courses, to determine if frequent quizzes improved the students’ academic performance.
Laboratory settings were excluded from the study because Crede and Sotola wanted to observe whether similar studies from labs would apply to general classrooms. They defined quizzes as low-stakes assessments of learned material that occurred at least once a week.
(ANI/RSS)
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