Do practice quizzes help students learn without stress?
Teachers who are up to speed with student mental health, pedagogy and working memory, will know that when anxiety is increased, retrieval weakens …
What this looks like in the classroom is when a teacher surprises a student by asking them a question. In that two-second moment, a student forgets what information is requested, and teachers who are unfamiliar with working memory processes view that the student is unable to recall a response to their question when, in fact, there is a lot more going on beneath the scenes.
A potential drawback of using practice quizzes is the potential to increase students’ anxiety (Steele, 2011).
In the paper Student Attitudes and (Lack of) Anxiety for Online Practice Quizzes (Hochstein, 2019), the research asks how online practice quizzes can facilitate learning without increasing student anxiety, offering practical applications for teaching.
Online practice quizzes are increasingly popular tools in classroom settings, used more and more for homework. Teachers can manage their workload more efficiently and gather data from students daily to gauge how students are making progress.
One byproduct that many schools have not yet cracked, I know, is how parents deal with all the logins to so many different platforms. It’s an easy way to disengage parents from taking an active role if they have to log into several applications.
