The somewhat-traditional teaching method of determining students’ grades based solely on a midterm and final exam was recently called into question by a psychology study. However, it’s unclear whether this new method will take wide effect at N.C. State.
Psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin released findings from an experiment this month in which 901 students in a popular introduction-to-psychology course took their laptops to class and were quizzed online. The researchers found that frequent quizzing, as opposed to a few large tests and projects, increased both class attendance and overall performance.
Scott Despain, an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, teaches Spanish I and gives several small quizzes throughout the semester. Usually, his quizzes only take 30 seconds to a couple of minutes to complete and come directly from the homework, Despain said.
“It facilitates students’ success,” Despain said. “I come from a background of learning by doing.”
Despain said he was previously a national Future Farmers of America officer. He said the organization’s motto, “Learning to do, doing to learn, earning to live, living to serve,” applied to his classes.
“If students want to meet the expectations we have for them, students need to be involved on a daily basis,” Despain said.
Despain said he has organized his class this way every year he’s taught it. The idea and class schedule both came from another professor who previously taught the class, he said.
Despain said he still considered changing the course outline when the class size became larger.
“Then I had to ask that question again: ‘Would it work in a large class, like it did in a small class?’” Despain said. “And it did. It worked.”
Improvements aside, Despain said he thinks he’s in the minority at N.C. State.
“It takes a lot of work to run a class like this,” Despain said. “Languages lend themselves to a lot of quizzes.”
Divya Tangella, a junior in psychology, said she prefers the more frequent quizzing style.
“Having a midterm and final just puts more pressure on the students to cram a bunch of information in their heads instead of giving them multiple opportunities to study,” Tangella said. “And with students having so many classes under their belt, it makes it difficult to study all at once, but with a quiz, we have to manage our time and study often.”
Tangella said she has noticed a lot of courses are becoming more diverse, and professors are giving students more opportunities with frequent quizzes.
“Students don’t retain information because there is no incentive,” Tangella said. “Yes, there is the incentive to get a good grade, but if there is no quiz tied to it, students find they put the assignment off. Quizzes aren’t weighted as much, causing less stress to the student too.”
Brooke Wilner, a sophomore in aerospace engineering, said she prefers frequent quizzing because it forces her to learn throughout the entire semester.
“If you have more tests, you study more often,” Wilner said.
Wilner said although she finds classes with frequent quizzes more stressful, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“It does increase the stress level of the class, but overall I prefer frequent quizzes,” Wilner said. “I found I put off [work in] my chemistry class, which only had a few tests, and I would just cram and forget the work afterward.”
Molly Burchins, a freshman in elementary education, said she also prefers frequent quizzes, because it forces you to concentrate on the material.
“Tests are usually cumulative, and it’s an overwhelming amount of information to try and learn for a test,” Burchins said.
In addition to better performance in class, the University of Texas study found that frequent quizzing also improved class attendance. According to James Pennebaker, one of the researchers, in the middle of the semester, attendance usually averages about 60 percent for his psychology classes.
“In this quiz class, it was 90 percent,” Pennebaker told The New York Times. “If you know you’ve got a quiz, you have to show up.”