Quizalize is a tool designed with the core purpose of helping teachers personalize learning. Most “personalized learning” tools are focused on giving students personal learning journeys that help students progress optimally at their own pace, but these tools are not that useful for teachers as it ends up with every student in a class at a different point in their learning journey. Instead Quizalize focuses on the idea that the teacher is teaching one or two learning objectives at any given time, but that students in a class will all be at a different level of understanding of those learning objectives. The goal is to help the teacher give each student the best possible support according to their current level of understanding. Whilst Quizalize can be used for both homework and live in class, it is particularly powerful at helping teachers personalize their support in real-time in the classroom.
We have heard and seen first hand how our personalized features benefit teachers. Just take a look at these testimonials below!
1. Automatic grouping into Strong, Almost there and Needs help categories
Quizalize presents a very clear and easy interface to the teacher that shows which of these three categories each student is in as a result of a quiz with students scoring less than 50% in the “Need help” group, those scoring 50% to 80% in the “Almost there” group and those scoring 80% or more in the “Strong” group. This allows the teacher to quickly work out which students to give which level of support with basic learning, practice or extension.
2. Differentiated follow on resources
Whilst the teacher can use the grouping data above to make their own in classroom decisions, they can configure the system to automatically give different students different follow on resources depending on the group they are in. For example, for students scoring less than 50% and in the “Need help” category a YouTube video or EdPuzzle with basic learning material can be automatically assigned. For students in the “Almost there” category, perhaps another Quizalize “Smart Quiz” (see later) with some different practice questions containing hints and explanations may be effective at helping them reach mastery. For students in the “Strong” category, perhaps a link to a web site with an extension activity on it or a Quizalize quiz with harder extension quizzes might be best.
3. Mutli-skill quizzes
Whilst many quizzes may be created to test a student’s understanding of a single skill (or learning objective), it is often useful to create quizzes that test four or more different skills in a topic. Quizalize allows teachers to tag each question to a different skill and then see how well each student has mastered each skill. Essentially the teacher is able to see which students are ‘Strong’, ‘Almost there’ and ‘Need help’ for each of the skills (as well as for the whole quiz). For example a teacher might create a 20 question quiz with 5 questions tagged to each of 4 different skills.
Teachers can then quickly see which students are struggling with which skills and then create dynamic groups in the classroom. A common approach here is to create four stations in the classroom each with a different activity related to one of the four skills. Students are then asked to go to the appropriate station depending on the skill they are struggling with most. Round Rock ISD found that this approach raised end of year scores in state standardised tests by 8-10% with a bigger impact on less able students.
A second use of multi-skill quizzes is for spiral learning. In these quizzes a teacher adds a couple of questions to the end of a quiz on a skill that was taught earlier in the term, but is not currently being taught. Teachers can then quickly identify students who have not retained understanding of this skill and give them some personal activities to ensure they don’t get left behind.
A third use of multi-skill quizzes is for benchmarking at the start of a school year or school term. This allows teachers to test students on material that was taught in previous years or previous terms and identify students who need extra help at this point. This can be particularly important to ensure that all students have knowledge of the prerequisites to ensure they can master the new material being taught in the new term.
Finally a very popular use of multi-skill quizzes is for delivering, say, 40 question quizzes covering the whole curriculum two or three weeks before important end of year summative tests. The data from these tests can help teachers both identify individual student learning gaps that need to be addressed, but also whole class learning gaps.
What makes Quizalize such a powerful tool for delivering multi-skill quizzes is that teachers can effortlessly create and tag questions for each skill using our AI powered quiz creator. Teachers simply select the skill they want to test from a drop down of skills in their standard, select and optionally edit the questions that they want to use from those suggested, and then repeat this process for the next skill. Teachers are able to create, say, a 40 question quiz covering 10 different skills in under 10 minutes.
4. Mastery Mode
Teachers can choose to assign a quiz in “Mastery Mode”. In Mastery Mode, whenever a student answers a question incorrectly, that question is added to the end of the quiz for the student to answer again. In this way, a student has to answer every question correctly in order to complete the quiz. Mastery mode is particularly helpful for helping students master basic knowledge such as vocabulary for language or science or social sciences.
5. Smart Questions and Smart Review
Quizalize also enables teachers to create Smart Quizzes containing Smart Questions or Smart Review. Smart Questions and Smart Review incorporate hints and explanations that turn a quiz into a personalised learning experience (rather than just a simple assessment). Whilst having hints and explanations in a quiz per se is not new, there are two aspects of the Quizalize implementation that make it powerful. First Quizalize, uses AI to help teachers instantly add hints and explanations to every question. This means that teachers can effortlessly create Smart Questions and Smart Reviews. Second, Quizalize has a unique UI that works these hints and explanations into the student experience so that it feels more like a one-on-one conversation with the teacher (rather than boring hints and explanations). Smart Review in particular replaces a boring results page that simply tells students which questions they answered correctly and incorrectly with an interactive and engaging conversation where students can choose to see hints and explanations given by the teacher if they wish.
Smart Questions and Smart Review can be used for every quiz, but can be particularly effective at helping students in the “Almost there” group reach mastery and progress to the “Strong” group.
6. Question types
Another popular way to use Quizalize for vocabulary learning is to create three different versions of the quiz for students at three different levels, where each quiz uses a different type of question. For example, a “multiple choice” quiz is often perfect for starting to learn new vocabulary, a quiz using our “scrambled letter” question type may be good for students who are trying to master the vocabulary and a quiz using the “type an answer” question type may be a good challenge for those who have largely mastered the vocabulary.
These three question types provide a natural progression of difficulty through learning vocabulary and can be nicely combined with Mastery Mode. Alternatively the first two easy and medium difficulty quizzes can be assigned as differentiated follow up resources for students who need help or are almost there when taking the hard quiz.
Summary
Quizalize has been pioneering features to help teachers personalize teaching in real-time in the classroom for many years. Whilst some of our innovations, such as automatic grouping and mastery mode, have now become industry standards and copied by our competitors, many of our features are unique and powerful features that continue to have a real impact on student learning and help teachers make a difference to each and every one of their students.
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