MIT Professor Pritchard suggests weekly quizzes over mid-terms - Here's why

Steve Nelson
pritchard

MIT Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics, David Pritchard, spoke to MIT faculty, staff, and students at MIT Open Learning’s xTalks about why students should be quizzed weekly rather than subjected to one or two test of knowledge through mid-term exams. He has collected research evidence showing that weekly quizzes, or even biweekly quizzes, are strongly preferred over standard midterms for pedagogical reasons including: better student learning, stronger student engagement, less copying of homework, and more positive course assessments.

Professor Pritchard had asked his students “when do they study” and the overwhelming response was “only when I have a test or exam”. This was the Ah-ha moment. In order to make students study weekly, he’d have to quiz them weekly.

“Time is the resource of the students,” Pritchard said, “as a teacher we spend that resource. It’s how we spend that resource that makes a course effective or not.”

Professor David E. Pritchard is principal investigator of the REsearch in Learning Assessing and Tutoring Effectively (RELATE) group and a member of the Center for Ultracold Atoms in the Research Laboratory of Electronics and at Harvard. With his son he developed and sold to Pearson MasteringPhysics.com, MasteringAstronomy.com, etc., which are used by ~ 4 million students annually.

You can view the video of his lecture here.