Example Activity: Reading Quiz

Use reading quizzes to prompt students timely engagement with course materials 

A variety of studies have shown reading quizzes in college courses can help improve the quality of class discussions and increase student exam grades. This improvement comes from encouraging students to space their studying throughout the week and prompting students to reflect on the material as they learn it. This helps them integrate and build upon previous content. Quizzes can use simple multiple choice questions that target a variety of learning levels, or they can include more open-ended reflections. The type of questions you use may be guided by the content of the course, the class size, and to what extent you wish to use auto-graded question types.

Try out this reading quiz!

For this example, we chose to use Canvas's Graded Quiz feature, letting students see their responses and the correct answers. We selected several different question-type formats so that you can see them from the student perspective. As you try out the quiz, note the ways different kinds of questions ask you to think about the reading you just completed. Note that as this is not an instructor guided course, we will not be providing feedback on the essay questions.

This is an example of an activity in Canvas you can use in your own course.  We have included points so that you can see a student viewpoint.  Consider participating if you'd like the student experience, but note that this is not a regularly monitored course and there won't be instructor facilitation or grading of this activity.