When I taught, I liked to assign short writing assignment every week. Nothing huge–just summarize the readings, usually by writing stand-alone sentences highlighting salient points. I thought this would be preferable to quizzes, but in retrospect, I’m no longer sure. What say you all?
I prefer quizzes. Quizzes are short and sweet. Regurgitation takes longer and, in my case, doesn’t improve recall. Before I was allowed to type assignments (this was back in the 90s–elementary school students handwrote everything), this was akin to torture.
Quizzes.
I had a literature professor who did not have written assignments at all. He instead gave tons of quizzes, with short quotes from the pieces of literature you were assigned to read, and you were supposed to say who said it, and from what piece, and roughly where. These weren’t easy quotes with names or places either – they were pretty ambiguous.
People complained that no one “really learned” the literature unless written work was involved, and he basically said, wrong, you don’t produce written work, you produce BS from Cliff Notes. This way, you’re forced to learn the literature and read it many times.
I hate to admit it, but he was right in the end. I have never read, studied, and re-read literature so much than in that class. Plus the side-benefit is that he had a lot less work in grading the tests.
Yeah, if you have to write a paragraph, you could do so by reading the Cliff’s Notes, or asking a classmate right before class “Quick—what was the reading about?” or even by doing the reading in a quick and perfunctory way, reading not for understanding but to be able to come up with a paragraph.
But quizzes, on the other hand, have to be well-designed, and shouldn’t just test recall of trivial, easily-forgotten details.
Well, I always required that the paragraph be typed, but I see your point.
Heh, I answered written because I’d find it EASIER to do and BS on…
Didn’t realize you were asking from the point of a teacher/which would be best to show i’d LEARNED the material: Then I’d go with quiz.
Which would I as a student rather do? The written paragraph, esp. if I can do it on my own time.
Easy peasy.
If you care about grades, the writing assignment should yield better grades. You proved you read the material, and typically those aren’t based on deep comprehension…just effort.
But a quiz…if it’s five questions and you miss one…bam, you got a B-. What color was his shirt on page 53? (And if that’s the type of question the teacher asks, then you’re just up the creek either way.)
Personally, I could do either one as a student.
From a teacher’s perspective, the writing assignment is easier to distribute and collect, but harder to correct.
As a teacher, I go back and forth (high school perspective here).
Quizzes are easier to grade (mostly) and seem less like “busy work” to the kids, but there are problems–one, it’s really hard to write a quiz so as that a struggling reader who really did read the material will pass but that a bright kid who read the Sparknotes will not. Second, kids don’t seem to see reading as “real” homework–since there is no product involved, it seems to be easier to skip entirely. Or they “read” by dragging their eyes across the paper without actually paying any attention.
Paragraphs (or reading questions or dialectical journals or whatever) solve these problems, but create others: they are easier to just straight out cheat on, and they take more time to grade. They also read until they can answer the question/write the paragraph and stop, because they mistake the assignment for the purpose.
I think kids learn to work any system in time, and so the best solution is not to have a system: sometimes have a take home writing assignment, sometime have reading questions, sometimes prepare discussion questions, sometimes have them come in and write a brief paragraph (with evidence!) for the quiz, sometimes have a matching quiz, sometimes have a short answer quiz, sometimes true/false, sometimes require that they answer 3 questions aloud over the course of the class discussion. One hopes that this means that they will see that the point is to read with both comprehension and insight.
Essays have always been my saving grace. If I know the teensiest thing about a subject I can write the hell out of it in an essay. I took many HS and College grades from average to A-ish thanks to the wonderful lovely Essay!
I voted quiz, from a student perspective, because I always hated little writing assignments. First you have to try and figure out what the professor thinks are the salient details, then you have to actually write it up, then edit. I’d much prefer a single-sentence-answer quiz, which lets me skip parts one and three. Multiple choice is, of course, even better, but I suppose less educational.
ETA: since I’d usually done the reading in question, I’m much more focused on amount of work involved, rather than difficulty
When I read, I will often remember the general message of the reading/flow of the story, but forget most of the details. All too often, quizzes would ask me for details, which made me look like I hadn’t done the reading when I really had. So I voted for the paragraph.
BUT … come the end of the semester, a test was definitely preferable to a paper. It required less effort to feel adequately prepared for a huge test than it took to prepare a well-written paper.
I want a combo, maybe even do both each week only recording the highest grade. For college, if you are going to have quizzes in class, that makes attendance mandatory - and as a working adult who traveled while going to school, that was hard. Two of my three grade point dropping grades was a result of “regular quiz, no you can’t make them up” and traveling for work.
I posted my perspective as an undergrad, which was writing assignment. However, my reasoning would have been that a quiz made it impossible to skip class, so you may want to consider that in tallying the votes.
If attendance is important because you are going to be doing stuff the students couldn’t pick up on their own with the textbook, then use that to your advantage. But I did resent professors who leveraged that to get an audience for their textbook regurgitation. And it is unfair to those whose life circumstances make perfect attendance more of a challenge.
If you have the time/ energy to make the writing assignments something that actually helps the students become better writers, I’d be a fan of them for more legitimate reasons. That’s a skill that will serve the students and society well long after they’re done with your class.
For what purpose is the assessment intended? If it’s diagnostic assessment (intended to determine the degree to which the students are ‘getting it’), then use short summaries. If it’s summative (contributing to a certificate ‘grade’) then use quizzes. Either way is kinda bullshit assessment. There are much better ways of getting diagnostic feedback or summative data then quizzes and summaries. Both these are chickenshit and unprofessional. Lift your game and be more creative about assessment.
Quizzes tend to ask about objective information, while written responses tend to ask subjective questions. I think that I’m pretty good at both (I am a good writer but also a quick-witted test-taker), but I think that quizzes are a better teaching method. First, it is much easier to BS a written response than a quiz. Second, they take less time to grade, and that’s good for instructors. Less total time expended is a good thing.
But for me, the most important factor is that subjective questions are way over-emphasized at the college/university level right now, especially in the Humanities. Naive teachers try to make classes “open-ended” and try to focus on the variety of “perspectives” available. The result: classes that are mind-bogglingly easy.
Here at the UW, we have what is called the Comparative History of Ideas major. I do know a couple of smart CHID majors, but overall, the consensus is that CHID courses are a joke. You can write about anything in a paper, expressing any opinion, and as long as you quote Derrida, Proust, and can run spell/grammar check, you’ve got an easy 4.0. I have never heard anybody voice worries about a CHID exam or about their grade in a CHID course. The same goes for the vast majority of courses that ask subjective, evaluative questions.
I voted written assignment, but I’d go the other way if the reading was something I’d already read. In that case, I’d take the quiz; I have a pretty decent memory and it’d take far less time.
I voted the way I did, though, because I always refused to complete reading assignments where I didn’t have my choice of what to read. (When assigned something I actually wanted to read, I’d do it after the semester was over.) My method for writing about things I hadn’t read was to reduce everything I knew about it in passing to an abstraction, conduct a thorough overanalysis of each aspect of those ideas in relation to one another, figure out how to combine them into some kind of ideological point, and crystalize accordingly. I have yet to get anything other than an A on a paper. (Admittedly, Finnegan’s Wake would have been my downfall if she hadn’t accepted my load of postmodern deconstructivist twaddle as an intentionally ironic commentary.)
I imagine this is both the cause and result of my liberal arts education focusing on Philosophy rather than English.
I think it depends on the type of class. I took an art history course and we never took a quiz or test, but rather had to write short paragraphs and then long (10-15 page) papers and I LOVED that approach for the class. However, taking something like economics or health classes, I’ve generally disliked the writing a paragraph or page approach and would have much preferred quizzes.
So I suppose if it’s technical or related to numbers and facts that are supposed to memorized, I would prefer quizzes, but if it’s more open-ended like history, philosophy, art, etc. than I prefer writing.