I was thinking of giving weekly quizzes this year as a form of assessment. The reason would be that I don't really plan on grading much of the homework since it would be a chance for them to practice and I would go over it and will grade most of it on completeness. I just had so many problems last year with homework that I'm not sure what to do anymore in terms of homework. This was at a different school and one that I will no longer be working at since it was terrible. I'm trying to figure out what to do for this year. I remember having weekly quizzes when I went to school way back when and the teachers would drop the lowest or 2 lowest scores. They would be really short quizzes (10 questions max). Would this be too much for the students and take too much time away from teaching? The other option was to have homework packets (which I would grade all of it on accuracy) but then it's hard to make those since I don't know if I will be able to cover everything on the packet that week. Which one do you think would be better? I don't plan on making either worth very much of the grade, maybe 10% and definitely less than 20% since neither are intended to be summative assessments and I don't want to stress them out. Any other input on how you do it would be great.
I like to give regular quizzes, but I don't tell students that there is one every single week (or on a set day). I like some flexibility as to when I schedule them. In one particular week, I may even have two or more quizzes if that's where I am with my instruction. In terms of homework, I check or collect it every single night when I assign it. If I didn't do that, I know that most of my students wouldn't do it--even in my higher level classes. My seniors (AP students) get a homework calendar for each unit detailing the unit schedule and assignment due dates. For my other classes (9th grade), I write the assignment on the board each day.
Both as a student and a teacher, I prefer weekly quizzes. They are a good way to check in with students to gauge understanding and they keep everyone on their toes.
I give quizzes pretty frequently in my AP class, either once a week or once every other week; they are 50 or 100 points and are 15 questions. My typical quiz would include 10 AP multiple choice (5 points each), 3 short answers (10 points each), and 1 open response (20 points).
My partner teacher and I gave a quiz every Monday. We had the same learning targets, and we'd give a quiz every Monday on the targets from the previous week.
I give frequent quizzes, but like a previous poster said, I don't want to commit to one per week. I think they're great and they really do not take much time at all. If I allowed my students to start on them once I passed them out, I'd have many of them done before I got to all the students! A ten question quiz for just recall takes about 2 minutes. My quizzes that have math or problems that need to be worked out usually have 3-5 questions on them.
I definitely agree with little quizzes throughout the week. It's a lot easier than trying to grade all their homework and you can easily see who is struggling and with what.
I usually do vocab quizzes every Friday. If we didn't add new vocab that week I bring back some of their older words to refresh them. If the words are from way back I'll use them in a sentence so they can practice using context clues.
Thank you so much to everyone for their feedback. I guess weekly quizzes will work then although I won't tell them it will be every week as someone suggested.
I started doing it near the end of my last teaching placement last year. I really liked it. I made them fairly simple, but it was a reliable way to get info on how students were doing. I had them take it on sheets of binder paper, but this year, I think I'm going to institutionalize it more, and type them out beforehand, and make copies. My questions are based on the warm-ups all week, so it gives students an incentive to complete the warm-ups, keep them in their binder, and review them.
Last year I gave weekly quizzes on the same day every week. I found that students really enjoyed the structure of that sort of schedule. I used an online quiz program (Easy Test Maker) that scored all the quizzes automatically. I had it set to show students their scores immediately upon submission. The students were always telling me how much they liked getting their scores right away.
