In our increasingly sedentary culture, it’s important to give students opportunities to move and interact face-to-face during the school day. A [low-stakes] communicative class quiz is the perfect way to inject a little energy into your classes! Use this adaptable model after presenting any content to students, be it information in a lecture, a story that was read by students or told orally, a film that they watched, an article they read, or… well… anything!
How to administer a communicative quiz
Use a form to keep things simple!
Print copies of the True/False (T/F) Storyboard Quiz for each student. They will use it for the duration of the activity!
Find the TF Storyboard Activity Form in the “Forms” folder of the Subscriber Library.
First step: students write questions and answers
Each student writes five T/F statements about the content that you’ve been working with in class. They also record the correct answers. All questions and answers should be recorded on this form.
Next step: Communicate!
Each student must administer his/her T/F quiz orally to a series of three classmates and record their responses on the printed form. I recommend using the “Stand Up, Hand Up, Pair Up” Kagan structure or Inside/Outside Circles to help students find their three ‘pupils’ quickly!
Make it a Storyboard Quiz
Before beginning this activity, each student must create an illustrated storyboard for a story or informational text that has been read or otherwise shared in class.This can be very simple, such as a piece of computer paper divided into a 3×3 grid, with nine scenes from a story illustrated in the nine frames of the storyboard. Students must number the frames of the storyboard. It is okay if each student’s storyboard looks a little different; even if the storyboards are for different stories or are for the same story, but it is broken up differently between frames.
Students must write the T/F statements in reference to the illustrations (which are depictions of the content). The T/F statements that they write must be answerable based on the pictures included within the frames of the storyboard.
Have students show their storyboards to their classmates when asking them the quiz questions!
Do they show their storyboard to their partners during the quiz or are students already familiar with the storyboards? I love using student created materials for activities beyond just making the material!
Yes, they should point to the frames on their storyboard as they reference it in each question.
Question emailed from a teacher:
Hola,
I was wondering what do you do with the “grades” students get on each others’ quizzes? Do they hand them in to you and you can see how many did how well?
Thanks!
My response:
I use them as a formative assessment, as you surmised. You can’t put them in the grade book as an actual grade because the quiz-giver might have made the mistake, not the quiz-taker. But it will give you a good glance at the class’s general understanding. I put in a Work Habits grade to the grade book for completion/participation–if kids finished it and were working diligently, they get an A. If not, the grade decreases in proportion to the degree to which they missed the expectation.