The effectiveness of PowerPoint Quizzes

The advantage of using any type of quiz in a classroom environment is that the students look at it as a break from work and a time to have fun with a game, if it is disguised well enough. PowerPoint Quizzes provide an excellent opportunity during a lecture to ask the students a question to enforce the knowledge of what they have heard or read. Students who are not paying attention are caught out and will make sure that they are listening to the content for the rest of the lecture in order to answer the question correctly. I believe this is the best way to utilise PowerPoint quizzes.

Furthermore, if an attempt is made by the designer of these questions to make them contextualised within real situations, then further learning is achieved. Students may even be asked to answer the question as a group, thus creating the students as one whole community of thought. The good thing about quizzes is that they are adaptable in many situations. They can be personalised for success or failure, be straight forward and easy to build confidence, or challenging and tricky to produce higher order thinking.

I once used a PowerPoint Quiz as comic relief in one Learning Experience for students who were aware of an incident of fighting that had occurred at school earlier in the day. I tried to be creative and humorous with the questions, for instance, showing a picture of a famous politician and asking students where they were from or how old they thought each person was, it was really quite funny and the students took their mind of the incident.

Felder, F & Spurlin, J (2005), Applications, Reliability and Validity of the Index of Learning Styles, North Carolina, http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSdir/ILS_Validation(IJEE).pdf