Are Quizzes Good for Learning Skills Or Just Memorization? A Teacher’s Perspective
Last Wednesday afternoon, I was sitting at my cluttered 4th grade desk grading multiplication quizzes, sticking strawberry-scented scratch-and-sniff stickers on every paper with a 100% score. Mia, who sits in the third row by the window, bounced up before I even called her name, grinning. She’d gotten a perfect score on her 8s times table quiz, her third perfect that month. Ten minutes later, though, she was at my desk again, twisting a strand of dyed-blue hair around her finger, staring at the field trip word problem on her worksheet: “If each of the 27 students going on the trip needs 8 snacks, how many snacks do we need to pack total?” She had no idea where to start.
That night, I was sitting on the porch waiting for my 12-year-old son Jax to get back from his first driving lesson with my husband, and the whole interaction clicked. Two weeks earlier, Jax had aced his learner’s permit written test after spending a week drilling practice quizzes on his phone. He got every question about road signs and right-of-way right, memorized every rule. But 10 minutes into his first time on a main road, he signaled to change lanes and pulled right in front of a pickup truck, because he never thought to check his blind spot. He’d memorized the rule for the quiz, but he hadn’t learned the skill.
That’s the question I get from parents all the time, actually: If my kid aces all their weekly quizzes, does that mean they’re actually learning the skill, or just memorizing stuff for the test? For years I leaned into quizzes because they’re easy to grade, they give a clear number to put in the grade book, and admins love them for tracking progress. But moments like Mia’s word problem and Jax’s blind spot have made me rethink where quizzes fit, and when they’re not enough.
First off, I don’t think quizzes are useless. They’re actually really good at what they do: helping lock basic facts into memory. And you can’t build a skill without that basic memorization, right? If a kid is still counting on their fingers to get 8×6 every time they see it, they can’t focus on solving a multi-step word problem or learning how to do fractions. Quizzes are the perfect tool for that first step. I still use weekly times table quizzes, I quiz my own kids on vocabulary before their tests, I even use flashcard quizzes when I’m learning how to identify native wildflowers for my garden. They work for memorization, and memorization matters.
But the problem comes when we stop at the quiz. When we assume that a 100% on a quiz means the skill is learned. Because memorization is just recalling information when it’s presented to you in the same format it was taught. A skill is being able to pull that information out and use it when you don’t have a prompt telling you exactly what to recall. That’s the difference between Mia remembering 8×7 is 56 when the quiz asks “8×7 = ___” and her figuring out that she needs to multiply 27 by 8 to get the number of snacks for the field trip. That’s the difference between Jax picking “check your blind spot” as the right answer on a multiple-choice quiz and actually doing it without being told when he’s driving.
The small change I’ve made that doesn’t add much extra work to my lesson planning is this: I add one open-ended, real-world question to the end of every quiz I give. It’s just one question, so it doesn’t add 20 minutes to grading, and it shifts the whole point of the quiz. After 10 8s multiplication problems, I add: “Your family is buying pizza for a movie night. Each pizza has 8 slices. If 5 people each eat 3 slices, how many pizzas do you need to buy?” For a vocabulary quiz, after matching 10 words to their definitions, add: “Use the word ‘erosion’ in a sentence about something you’ve seen at the park.” For parents quizzing their kids at home, after you finish going through the flashcards, just ask three quick application questions: “Can you tell me how you’d use this rule when you’re writing your essay?” or “When would you need this math fact this week?” It takes 2 extra minutes, and it immediately shows you whether your kid can do more than just parrot back what they memorized.
Another thing I’ve started doing is mixing up active quizzes instead of all paper-and-pencil. When we’re working on map skills, instead of just quizzing kids on the names of state capitals, we’ll do a quick 5-minute quiz where they have to map out the route from our classroom to the cafeteria, using the compass directions they memorized. For Jax’s driving practice, we started doing little on-the-go quizzes instead of just letting him practice: every time we approach a stop sign, I’ll say “quick quiz: what do you need to do before you pull out again?” and he has to do it, not just say it. It takes the memorization and turns it into action, which is what a skill actually is.
This week, Mia raised her hand before I could walk her through that snack problem, and said “Wait, that’s just 27 times 8, right? I can do that.” She got the right answer, and I didn’t even have to say anything. Jax passed his road test last Saturday, though he still forgets to check his blind spot sometimes when he’s talking to me about his favorite video game. I still get pushback sometimes from people who say quizzes are the best way to measure progress, and that we don’t have time to add extra stuff. I don’t have a perfect system, and I still give quizzes for grades because that’s what the school requires. But I know that if I stop at the quiz, I’m only doing half the job. Right now, adding that one extra question is working pretty well, and that’s enough for me.
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