Team & Partner Quizzes

In the beginning of my career, I would have never given out a team quiz! Each student needed to show me what they did or didn’t know. This was before I viewed team quizzes as a learning activity as opposed to a summative assessment. This is how I approach it.

For team quizzes, I make 4 versions of a quiz and then give a different version to each member of the team. For partner quizzes, I make two versions and give different versions to each partner. This allows students to work together – but no one is able to directly copy off of another student. Students can ask each other questions and discuss processes for solving problems as opposed to just final answers.

If I am feeling extra nice, I give each team a notecard. I allow them to ask me one question during the testing period. Once they decide on a question, they write it on the notecard and hand it to me. This is so that I have evidence of their one question. It also forces teams to work together, because they don’t want to use up their one question on something one of their teammates might know. I typically use this tactic at the beginning of the year when students in the class are still getting familiar with each other.

Upon returning the assessments, I group students together who took the same version of the assessment. Students then work together in those teams to learn from their mistakes.

I love using this on mini quizzes throughout the unit. It allows students to learn what they know – and then try to learn what they don’t know from a classmate. Typically students approach test day without knowing what they do and don’t understand and this is a low stress approachable solution to that problem.

Most of my students have agreed that they learned a lot from the experience and preferred it over a regular quiz. There are a few students who would rather talk to no one and complete everything themselves – and there will always be those types of students. I would recommend giving it a try in your classroom to spark some mathematical conversation and class team building!