I dream of the day when I will be able to assign reading homework, and all of my students will read it thoroughly and come prepared to
discuss the selection in class the following day without any extra incentive, prodding, or threats of quizzes.
I’m still dreaming.
While most of our students will indeed read assigned homework passages, a few students will only read if they absolutely have to, and too many students will skim a passage instead of reading carefully. For this reason, when I am teaching a book or long work, I usually give a quick daily quiz over the homework. If students know they will have to take a quiz, most of them will read the passage carefully.
Many teachers, however, balk at the idea of daily quizzes because they don’t want to have to make up quizzes over assigned reading; they don’t want to grade daily quizzes, and they don’t want to lose so much valuable class time. I use a simple process for making and grading quizzes that takes very little time away from class.
- I duplicate one quiz sheet for each student. This sheet can be used for 6 daily quizzes. Download Reading Quizzes
- For each homework selection I make up 5 words, terms, concepts, or names that anyone who read the passage would know. For example, if we read a selection where a family adopted a dog, I would add the word “dog” to my quiz. I make sure that my 5 words cover the entire reading passage and are not taken exclusively from the beginning of the passage or the end of the passage.
- In class I distribute the blank quiz sheet and tell students that they will take a quiz each day. I then call out the five words for today’s quiz and instruct the students to write them on their sheet. You may prefer to write the five words on the board or overheard.
- I then tell students that they are to define the word or identify it so I can tell they read the homework assignment. I instruct them to reply to each word in approximately 5 words and emphasize that they should not write in sentences. For example, for “dog,” students only need to reply “family adopts.”
- The quiz should take no more than 10 minutes.
- I then collect the quizzes and place them in a notebook to grade. I can flip through the quizzes quickly and grade 30 quizzes in roughly 10 minutes. As I grade quizzes, I always concentrate on whether or not I think the student read the assignment. If I think he did, I give him the benefit of the doubt on each word.
- On the following day, I pass out the graded quizzes and tell students to move to the next block to take Quiz 2.
- I vary the difficulty level of the quiz according to the grade level of students and the level of the reading material.
- To give an incentive to students who are present each day and to allay student whining about the obscurity of some items on the quiz, I award 50 points to the final quiz of students who take all of the quizzes and who refrain from whining about the quizzes. It works! (Students always want to add the points to their lowest quiz grade, but it makes no difference mathematically which quiz receives the extra-credit points.)
- I make sure that I give different words on the quiz for each class that I teach because we know that students from earlier in the day tell other students what is on the quiz.
Here’s an example of a quiz I give on The Glass Castle (pages 3-28)
- dumpster (author sees mother in dumpster)
- fire (burned while cooking hotdogs)
- Blue Goose (family’s car)
- chlorinated water (only for sissies)
- seizures (Brian has seizures as child
For each of the selections above, I would accept alternate answers that show the student read the homework assignment.
In time, students realize they must read carefully each night. While daily quizzes often hurt a student’s average, with this quiz format, students read better and their grades actually improve because of so many excellent quiz grades.