While study strategies like underlining, highlighting, and note-taking help your students feel productive, these strategies don’t always help students learn. Without a chance to practice new knowledge, many online students immediately forget what they read in textbooks or hear in presentations.
To help students remember, teachers have to get creative. One innovative method is—believe it or not—more testing. Research shows that frequent testing doesn’t just measure learning, it actually promotes it. Students are better at recalling, retrieving, and applying new information after taking a test on it. Behavioral researchers call this phenomenon “the testing effect” or “the retrieval practice effect.”
If you teach online courses, it’s even more important to make frequent testing a part of your curriculum. These tests help online students apply their knowledge in an environment with few opportunities for practical learning. Here’s how to incorporate quizzes into your online learning program:
As a teacher, it’s important to not only quiz often, but also to quiz well. For best results, ask your students questions that vary in both difficulty and format. Online learning platforms make it easier than ever to build engaging quizzes that help your students apply their knowledge in new ways. Here’s how to create a great quiz:
Online learning platforms use gamified formats like sliders, ranking, and images to transform tests into fun challenges. It’s fun, but not for fun, since behavioral researchers say that varied practice is what ultimately builds mastery.
Tests help online students learn by giving them a chance to apply their knowledge, but testing also plays another role: keeping students in class. There is a higher chance of students disengaging, getting distracted, or dropping out of online learning programs completely. To stem distraction, keep students alert and engaged with frequent quizzes, mini-assessments, and tests.
SurveyMonkey quizzes allow you to easily assign points to each question that gets added, provide real time customized feedback for every question that gets answered, and analyze results at both the individual and aggregate level.