Active Reading through Self-Assessment: The Student-Made Quiz

Overview

Featured Resources

From Theory to Practice

 

OVERVIEW

While reading often feels like a solitary activity, teachers can introduce active reading strategies that are social to help students better comprehend their reading. This recurring lesson encourages students to comprehend their reading through inquiry and collaboration. They work independently to choose quotations that exemplify the main idea of the text, come to a consensus about those quotations in collaborative groups, and then formulate “quiz?questions about their reading that other groups will answer. By the end of this lesson, students will have a better understanding of what to focus on in their reading and how to ask good questions.

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FEATURED RESOURCES

• T-Chart Printout: Students use this printout to gather quotations from a common text and write quiz questions for their peers.
  

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FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

“One of the most important challenges a teacher faces is motivating his or her students to complete reading assignments and to complete them carefully? The [Student-Made] Quiz offers at least five benefits:

• It provides the standard incentive to read carefully.
• It allows the teacher to give the students immediate feedback.
• It reduces the busywork of grading quizzes.
• It raises the quality of class discussion.
• It serves as a vehicle for collaborative, student-centered learning?(89).

This recurring lesson allows students to work together to better understand their reading by discussing its main ideas before they formulate quiz questions for their peers. These questions move beyond comprehension and test students?understanding of the significance of the texts they read. The class can then discuss the answers together, providing another learning opportunity, rather than the teacher correcting the quizzes without student input.

Further Reading

Quinn, Timothy and Todd Eckerson. “Motivating Students to Read with Collaborative Reading Quizzes.?English Journal. 100.1 (2010): 89-91.

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