Reimagining the Reading Quiz: Peer Instruction in English

By Valerie Bherer, John Abbott College

At a Glance

Discipline

  • Languages and Literature

Instructional Level

  • College & CEGEP

Course

  • Introduction to College English (Fiction)

Tasks in Workflow

Social Plane(s)

  • Individual
  • Group

Type of Tasks

  • Analyzing
  • Discussing

Technical Details

Useful Technologies

  • MS Forms

Class size

  • Small (20-49)

Time

  • Brief segment of class period (< 20 mins)

Inclusivity & Accessibility

  • Variety of action & expression

Instructional Purpose

  • Preparation & knowledge activation

Overview

The aim of this activity is to get students to use their knowledge of the text to support a position, to consider other points of view and to learn to review their interpretation to account for different or more convincing evidence.

This activity helps students develop disciplinary skills that they will need to apply to essay writing, such as justifying their thesis with textual evidence, developing a nuanced interpretation, and revising their work.

Students take a reading quiz; the last question is a multiple-choice interpretive question. Students pick an answer and write a rationale (closed book). Then, they get into groups with people who answered the same answer; they must improve their rationale (open-book) and share it with the class. After hearing all the rationales, students vote on the most convincing rationale (they may be allowed to review their answer to the interpretive question as well).

This activity adapts the script of Peer Instruction, primarily used in the sciences, to an English context. It can be used on a recurring basis as a beginning-of-class activity to help with reading compliance and to kickstart discussion via an assessment.

Instructional Objectives

Students will be able to justify their answer choice by using textual evidence and by explaining their evidence.

Workflow & Materials

Workflow

Activity Workflow

View on CourseFlow
Document

Voting Template

Valerie Bherer

Document

Sample Quiz "The Lottery"

Valerie Bherer

Contributor's Notes

Benefits
Challenges
Tips
Benefits
  • Initiates students to the literary skills they need to apply in their essays and encourages them to practice these skills
  • Creates an awareness of audience, as students have to persuade others
  • Students get to hear multiple perspectives and to refine their understanding of the text
Challenges
  • Some students are opposed to the idea that the class can decide on the right answer. In this case, the teacher can emphasize the minimal impact of the answer on their overall grade (in my case, the “correct” answer for the quiz was worth 0.4% of their total grade for the course) and highlight the benefits of the exercise. I also told students they could dispute the results in office hours, where they would continue the exercise of justifying their position.
  • The main difficulty lies in the creation of a question that is sufficiently controversial to allow for an even spread of answer choices. If students all choose the same answer, they will miss out on the benefits of this activity. The answer choices should all be valid.
  • This activity can be time consuming. The teacher should see this activity as both a quiz and a discussion activity, as students will have already “warmed up” by creating their rationales and discussing their answers. I would also suggest limiting this exercise to one significant question.
Tips
  • As the students turn in their copies, I track the number of answers and group the students as I go. I then separate them into manageable group sizes (there may be more than one group working on an answer choice, in which case students will be encouraged to vote for the “best” rationale, not the answer choice that has the most rationales).
  • Students could try to “game” the system by jointly deciding to all answer the first answer (for example) and then voting for that choice later. To avoid this issue, I have created different copies with the choices in different order. However, it should also be stressed to students that the rationale also counts, so picking an answer at random will make it difficult to get a good rationale.
  • For this activity to work well, it is imperative that students have a good way to share their rationale, such as posting it in a document that everyone can read, writing it on a whiteboard, etc.
  • The voting should be private (in an online platform or on slips of paper) and mandatory.

Applied Strategies

Peer Instruction & Think-pair-share

Communication, conceptual reasoning and reflection