Are Quizzes Enough to Actually Learn a Skill? What I’ve Learned As a Teacher and Mom
Last Monday, I stood on the cracked blacktop beside my 4th grade class’s new garden beds, holding Mia’s 100% score area quiz from Friday in one hand and a tape measure in the other. The air smelled like freshly cut clover and the lemon candy Mia keeps in her desk. She’d just stared at the L-shaped raised bed for five minutes, biting the edge of her thumbnail, and told me she couldn’t figure out how much soil we needed to order. “I remember it’s length times width,” she said, “but this doesn’t have one length and one width. Did I forget everything?”
I’d seen this same pattern a dozen times this year. Last month, three kids aced their spelling quiz on words with silent letters, then misspelled half of them in the personal narrative essays they wrote the next week. Back at home, my 10-year-old son quizzed out on basic bike part names last spring, acing every flashcard I made him, but when his chain slipped off on our ride to the park last month, he just stood there holding the handlebars and said he didn’t know where to start.
I get emails from parents every week asking some version of the same thing: If my kid gets an A on all their quizzes, why can’t they actually do the thing? Are quizzes even helping them learn the skill, or are they just teaching them to memorize stuff for Friday and forget it by Monday?
I used to think the problem was that my kids weren’t studying hard enough, or I wasn’t writing good enough quizzes. Now I think it’s simpler than that. Quizzes are really good at what they’re built for: checking what you can recall from memory. They’re just not built to check if you can do a skill.
A few years back, our school shifted to weekly progress quizzes to track student growth for district data. It made sense on paper, quick checks that let me see who needs extra help with basic facts or formulas. What I didn’t anticipate was how easy it would be to mistake a good quiz score for actual mastery. When Mia got 100% on that area quiz, it checked all the boxes: she could state the formula, she could calculate the area of plain rectangles given to her on a worksheet. That quiz told me she’d memorized the information she needed. What it didn’t tell me was whether she could use that information when the problem didn’t look exactly like the one she studied.
It’s not that quizzes are useless. I still use them every week to check that kids have the basic building blocks down. If you can’t recall your multiplication facts, it’s a lot harder to stop and calculate area when you’re planning a garden. The mistake I was making for a long time was stopping at the quiz. Now I do three small things that take almost no extra time that help me (and parents) see if we’re actually building a skill, not just memorizing.
First, I add one ungraded real-world question to the end of every quiz. It doesn’t have to be fancy. For the area quiz, it’s just “Our classroom bookshelf is 6 feet tall and 4 feet wide. What is its area?” For spelling quizzes, it’s “Write one sentence using two of this week’s spelling words correctly.” It takes 30 extra seconds for kids to answer, and 10 extra seconds for me to grade, and it immediately tells me who gets it and who just memorized the word for the test.
Second, once a unit, I swap a full recall quiz for a low-stakes performance check. Instead of asking kids to name all the parts of a sentence, I ask them to write three sentences about their favorite weekend activity and label the subject and verb in each. For parents working at home, this is even easier: if your kid just aced a quiz on fractions, ask them to split a batch of cookies evenly between the four people in your family. If they aced a vocabulary quiz, ask them to point out three things in the living room that fit the vocabulary word (like “soft” or “rectangular”). It’s no prep, it takes five minutes, and it’s a real check of skill.
Third, I stopped putting just a grade on quizzes that go home to parents. Now I add one line that says what’s next. If a kid got 100% on the recall questions but stumbled on the real-world one, I write “Great work memorizing area formulas! Next, we’re practicing using this for irregular shapes at school. You can practice at home by calculating the area of your bedroom floor this week.” That’s concrete, it tells parents exactly what they can do instead of just saying “good job” or “needs improvement.”
I still have weeks where I get busy and forget to add that extra question, or I lean too much on quiz scores to check progress. After the garden incident, Mia and I sat on the playground step and mapped out that L-shaped bed together, and I asked her what would happen if we split it into two smaller rectangles. She thought for a minute, did the math, and came up with the right number all on her own. She still needs more practice with irregular shapes before I’d say she’s mastered that skill, and that’s okay.
The 100% on her quiz didn’t mean she’d learned the whole skill, but it also didn’t mean the quiz was useless. It just meant it only told part of the story. Right now, that’s the best I can do: use quizzes to check the memorization, then look for the rest of the story when we’re actually doing the thing. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a lot better than celebrating a good quiz score and wondering why the skill never sticks.
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