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Areas of use for quizzes and polls

As a teacher, are you wondering when you can use quizzes and polls in your teaching? In this section, you will learn about different areas of use with explanations and short examples. For instance, activating your students, collecting feedback, creating polls, and conducting graded assessment.

The area of use for quizzes and polls can be divided into three categories:

  • Activating students.
  • Collecting feedback and conducting polls.
  • Implementing graded assessment.

Activating students

As a teacher, you can increase students' concentration and engagement by varying how you teach with quizzes and polls. It also helps you move away from learning situations where students are passive. If you create questions to be answered outside of class time, you can also help students maintain a more even pace of study throughout the course.

Examples of ways to activate your students with quizzes and polls:

  • Discussion questions that are answered individually or in groups. This increases interaction between students.
  • Thought-provoking questions about introduced concepts.
  • Auto-corrected practice quiz with feedback.
  • Exit tickets: brief questions about the content of the teaching session that students answer at the end of the class. The goal is for the students to reflect on the session, and for you as a teacher to receive quick feedback. It is a good basis to, for example, identify what needs to be repeated in the next session.
  • Reconciliations: mandatory, recurring polls on how students perceive their progress in the course. It works exceptionally well in courses where you, as a teacher, have limited contact with the students, such as courses held remotely.

Recommended tool: The one that is easiest to use, all tools provided by KTH work. For example, Mentimeter  or Canvas Quiz .

Get feedback and conduct polls

Students tend to feel more motivated to participate in activities when they believe they can influence them and when they feel their attendance is crucial. You should take advantage of the feedback provided by the students as it can often provide new insights and ideas.

Feedback and voting should be conducted anonymously as it encourages more people to respond. The responses are also more honest, particularly for students who would not have asked a "stupid" question otherwise.

Here are some examples of feedback and voting:

  • Ongoing feedback from students about the course or specific parts. For the best effect, tell the students what you intend to do with the feedback.
  • Voting on the current lesson's focus or on what needs to be explained more from the previous lesson.
  • "Do I need to rehearse something before we move on to the next part?".
  • Collection of discussion topics for future discussion.

Recommended tool: Mentimeter  or Polls in Zoom , as they offer anonymity.

Conduct graded assessment

A quiz allows you to have a graded assessment that is corrected automatically, in whole or in part. You can also randomize quiz questions from a collection and vary the content so all students get a unique combination of equivalent questions.

Here are some examples of graded assessment with quizzes:

  • Exam, preferably only the parts that can be corrected automatically.
  • Bonus points for the exam.

Recommended tool: Canvas Quiz  or Möbius (via Canvas) , as you must be able to connect the answers to the right student.