The Globe and Mail

“If it is a matter of retrieval, my iPhone can do it faster. I am more interested in can kids use that information in a meaningful way to solve meaningful problems,” says Garfield Gini-Newman, a lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, or OISE.

He understands why some teachers don’t like the idea of more testing. “More kids are being tested more often. There is an old saying that weighing the pig more often doesn’t make it grow heavier.”

But most teachers still see tests as a way to assess students, he says, not a way to help them learn. This research has the potential to change that. He says it makes sense that if quizzing helps students master basic skills, such as multiplication, they will be able to use that to help them solve problems.

The latest findings show quizzing does, in fact, help students apply what they have learned.

Andrew Butler at Duke University in North Carolina asked undergraduates to read material about bats and how they use echolocation to determine the size of objects and how far away they are. Some were quizzed on the information, while others had extra time to study it. Then he asked a question designed to see whether they could apply what they had learned in a different context. How would a bat determine whether an insect was moving toward it or away from it? The students who were quizzed performed significantly better.

The work applies to elementary school classrooms, he says, but adds it is important that educators understand that the “testing effect” can be achieved in different ways, including games or group activities. What matters is that children are asked to retrieve the information they have been taught. Many elementary teachers already do these sorts of activities, he says, including practice tests before the real spelling test, or “mad minutes,” where students have 60 seconds to answer as many multiplication questions as they can.

At Cornell Village Public School in Markham, part of the York Region District School Board,Trish Frolic’s Grade 5 class is halfway through a unit on geometry. A traditional quiz would require that they either identify or draw acute, obtuse and right-angled triangles. But Ms. Frolic asks them to create the shapes using elastics and plastic boards with rows of pegs on them. She has set up half a dozen tasks at different centres in the classroom and at each one they take a digital photo of their work so she can assess it.

The key, she says, is active learning that engages the students.

Joan Peskin, an associate professor at OISE, says it would be interesting to know whether extra quizzes are as effective as other methods that encourage active learning, in which children do more than listen to the teacher and take notes. One technique is to divide students into pairs or small groups. One student will summarize a section of the material they’ve just covered. The other will critique the oral summation and make additions. They switch roles for each section.

Quizzing is not in vogue and is almost a pejorative term in the education community, she says, but that does a disservice to students, especially those who struggle in the classroom.

“In the education community, we don’t look enough at the evidence, and the evidence seems to be quite strong,” she says. “It shows students’ learning greatly improves.”