Are Quizzes Enough to Learn a New Skill, Or Do They Only Help Memorization? A Teacher’s Perspective
The paper in front of me was clean, all 10 fraction multiplication problems marked in green pen, no mistakes. Milo, 10, slouched back in his chair and grinned, waiting for his sticker. This was Wednesday at my after-school math intervention class, the day we do our weekly skill check, and he’d nailed it. The next morning, our class was measuring ingredients for the cookie sale we hosted for the local animal shelter, and Milo stared at the recipe card like it was written in Greek. “The recipe is for 24 cookies, we need 12,” he said. “So what do I do to the 3/4 cup of sugar?” I asked him to remember what he did on his quiz yesterday, and he blinked. “That was just for the quiz,” he said. That line stuck with me. It’s the core of the question I get from parents all the time: are quizzes enough to actually learn a skill, or do they just help you memorize stuff?
I talked about it with Milo’s mom a week later at fall parent-teacher conferences. She told me she does 15 minutes of Quizlet with him every night, he gets 100% on every quick check sent home, but when they go grocery shopping and she asks him to estimate the total cost of three items that are around $4.50 each, he freezes up. “He says we didn’t practice that on the quiz,” she told me, shrugging. “I thought acing the quizzes meant he got it. What are we doing wrong?”
As a teacher of seven years and a parent of two middle schoolers, I’ve seen this pattern play out again and again. I’ve also fallen into it myself: my oldest daughter started Spanish last year, and I was so proud when she brought home back-to-back 100% on vocabulary quizzes. Then we stopped at a family-owned taco truck on vacation last summer that had its entire menu printed in Spanish, and she couldn’t pick out three common food words to order her own meal. “The quiz only asked me to match the word to the picture, not order actual food,” she said. It was the same line Milo had used two months before.
Here’s what I’ve figured out, from all these little moments: Quizzes are great for memorization. There’s no shame in that, and memorization isn’t a bad thing. If you can’t remember the steps to multiply two fractions, or what the Spanish word for taco is, you can’t use that information anywhere. Quizzes help pull information out of your brain repeatedly, which makes that information stick better than just reading it over and over. That’s a real, useful benefit. But memorizing steps or facts for a quiz isn’t the same as having a skill. A skill means you can use what you know when the problem isn’t formatted exactly the way you practiced it, when there’s no multiple choice option to pick from, when you’re not expecting to be asked that question. That’s the part quizzes almost never test, and they can’t build that part on their own.
The good news is you don’t have to throw out quizzes entirely to fix this. You just have to add a tiny, low-friction extra step to whatever you’re already doing, whether you’re a parent at home or a teacher in class. I started adjusting my own class a few years back, after the first time I saw this pattern with a different student. Instead of making the whole weekly quiz 10 identical practice problems that just test memorized steps, I swap out one question for a quick, real-world problem. That’s it. One extra question. For the fraction unit, it’s the half-a-recipe problem I mentioned earlier. For multiplication, it’s figuring out how many snack bars we need for the whole 28-person class if everyone gets one and packs come with 6 bars. It takes me 30 extra seconds to write the question, and a minute extra to grade 25 papers. For parents, it’s even easier. If you’re quizzing your kid on spelling words for Friday’s test, after you do the oral quiz, ask them to write one quick sentence about their own life using three of the words. That takes two extra minutes, no extra worksheets required. If you’re drilling multiplication facts with flashcards, after 10 minutes of quizzing, ask them to count how many days until their next birthday, then multiply that by 24 to find how many hours old they are. It’s a silly, quick game that puts the skill to use in a real context.
After I adjusted my weekly quizzes, it took about a month to see a change with Milo. We kept his five-question quick check to make sure he still remembered the steps, and added one applied question every week, plus one 10-minute hands-on activity a week with things like measuring and counting. Last week, we prepped for another small bake sale, and I handed him the recipe card for 12 cookies that needed to be doubled for 24. He paused for 10 seconds, did the math on a scrap paper, and said “One and a half cups of sugar, right?” He got it right. He still messes up sometimes on word problems that are phrased weird, and he still aces every quiz. But now the skill doesn’t only live on the quiz page anymore.
I still use quizzes. I think they have a real place in learning, as a quick check to see what’s stuck in memory, and memorization is a necessary first step to building any skill. But I don’t look at a 100% quiz score and assume a kid has learned something new anymore. I still have that scrap note I wrote after that first cookie sale day stuck to the edge of my desk: If it only works on the quiz, it isn’t learned. It’s a good reminder, for me as a teacher and as a parent. It’s easy to celebrate good quiz scores and check the “learned” box on our to-do list, but the whole point of learning a skill is to use it, when there’s no answer key and no prompt formatted exactly how you practiced. We’re still figuring it out, day by day, but adding that one extra question or two-minute activity has made a bigger difference than any extra quiz I’ve ever assigned.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Are Quizzes Enough to Learn a New Skill, Or Do They Only Help Memorization