Increasing Engagement and Retention with Student-Generated Quiz Questions

Asking students to write quiz questions can increase their engagement with and retention of material. If done from memory, it can act as a retrieval practice exercise, requiring students to remember and process information they’ve recently learned and thus, increasing retention. Whether or not performed from memory, this activity requires students to think critically, since they will be asked to carefully analyze the content, identify the important themes, make connections, and draft questions and answers that synthesize what they’ve learned. It also allows students and instructors to identify gaps in knowledge and understanding and make necessary adjustments. The student questions can be edited, adapted, and/or combined by the instructor and offered to other students for practice with the material or could be put to use on future quizzes.

Example

In the following example, the activity is offered for extra credit and is made available to help students prepare for the cumulative final exam. Students are required to provide ten multiple-choice questions, the correct answer, plausible incorrect answers (“distractors”) and feedback for correct and incorrect answers.

This example can be modified to include other types of questions (short answer, essay, etc.) and used as a graded assignment before weekly quizzes, mid-terms, etc.

Set up the exercise

Explain the benefits of this exercise and provide students with guidance on, or resources about how to generate appropriate questions.

Directions

For an online class:

• Review the document about creating effective quiz questions as presented in Canvas.
• Write a set of ten (10) multiple choice quiz questions that cover at least 4 different units. Each question should include the following:
  • The question
  • The correct answer
  • Two to four (2-4) distractors, or incorrect answers that are plausible.
  • Feedback that students would see after the quiz is submitted and graded. Typically, this feedback should include an explanation for why the correct answer is correct.
• Submit this as a Word document.

For an In-person class:

Use some class time or assign as homework to produce questions/answers/distractors and then use their questions during a review session. This way, the instructor can monitor the questions asked of the students, can correct any mistakes, or can ask students to help do that. It's all an oral exchange and done live.

Grading

Each question will be graded on the following criteria:

• Correct. The questions and answers are correct
• Viable. The questions make sense

Note: This is a difficult assignment for students. They aren’t typically good at this at first, but getting them to think critically about the content and experience writing questions is good practice. As you grade, consider that this is new to them and grade accordingly.