By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel

One way to engage students and foster their learning is through in-class quizzes (1). In-class quizzes have gained in popularity due to the open access to polling software that teachers can easily set up and students can engage with via their phones, tablets, or laptops (e.g., Kahoot, Slido, Poll Everywhere). Therefore, quick in-class quizzes are easy to administer in classrooms. The most common question format for such in-class quizzes is multiple-choice where the class is provided with a question with several answer alternatives from which students are asked to select the correct option. Afterwards, corrective feedback is presented to the class (i.e., the correct answer is displayed to the class) before the next question is presented.

A recent study by Mimouni (2) set out to investigate whether the effectiveness of in-class quizzes could be further increased by providing students with Reflective Class Feedback. Reflective Class Feedback goes beyond simply displaying corrective feedback and moving on. It engages the whole class in a reflective exercise and prompts students to think about why an answer is correct and the other alternatives not. It makes students think about each answer alternative, but also reflect on what they would need to know and to improve on to answer the question in the future. Reflective Class Feedback combines teacher-guided elaborative interrogation with class discussion.

Mimouni (2) tested the effectiveness of Reflective Class Feedback in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) first-year undergraduate course at the Ibn Zohr University in Morocco. The material covered English verb tenses and all students were tested at the beginning of the study on a 30-item Kahoot multiple-choice quiz (pre-test). Then one group of students was assigned to the control condition where after each lesson (6 lessons in total) students worked on a 10-item Kahoot quiz in groups of three. In this control condition, students were provided with automated, corrective feedback after each question. In the intervention condition, students worked on a 10-item Kahoot quiz after each lesson, but after each question the teacher engaged the class in Reflective Class Feedback. An example question on the quiz would be “Did you fly back last night?” alongside four answer alternatives: “Yes, I flied back last night.” | “Yes, I have flied back last night.” | “Yes, I flew back last night.” | “Yes, I was flying back last night.” The Reflective Class Feedback included elaborative interrogation in the form of prompts:

• Why do you think the option “Yes, I flew back last night” is the correct answer?

• What tense is in the option “Yes, I was flying back last night”?

• Why do you think this is not the correct tense?

• Why is it that only eight groups could answer the question correctly?

• What did you think about before you answered the question?

• What do you need to know to answer this question?

• What do you still need to improve to answer such questions?

Students were encouraged to discuss and justify their answers to the reflective prompts. The Reflective Class Feedback activity took 2-3 per question. At the end of the course, all students took a final 30-item Kahoot quiz on English past tenses where performance was measured. The findings show that students who engaged in Reflective Class Feedback outperformed students who just received corrective feedback on the in-class quizzes.

Incorporating brief reflective prompts that encourage students to think about the answers and justify why some answers are wrong and another is correct, leads to an increase in performance. This approach is not limited to EFL learning but can be adopted in different subjects. In addition, it is possible to shift the elaborative interrogation activity from a teacher-led to a more student-led task as the students gain practice in using this in a self-regulated way.

One limiting factor of Reflective Class Feedback may be the time it takes to complete it during regular class time: A 10-item quiz with 3 minutes for discussion after each question takes 30 minutes of classroom time. Adding approximately 30 seconds to answer each question in the first place would result in 35 minutes spent in class for this activity. In many cases, teachers will not have the time to integrate this in each of their lessons. So, what could be potential solutions to this?

1. Instead of integrating a Reflective Class Feedback activity in each class, dedicate one lesson to it mid-way through the course and incorporate spaced practice, too, by sampling questions from all past lessons.

2. Reduce the number of multiple-choice questions in the activity by strategically picking questions that cover material students struggle with most.

3. Integrate this kind of reflective feedback as part of homework assignments that requires students to write a brief blurb after answering a question using the prompts. Note that in this case, the social component of classroom discussion will be missing. However, the teacher could use the student reflections as a starting point for a follow-up in-class discussion around content that is yet not well understood.

Taken together, the Reflective Class Feedback seems to be an effective approach to engage students and increase their understanding of the material. While it is relatively straightforward to integrate into current teaching practice, it may require some tweaking to fit into the available teaching schedule.

References

(1) Castillo-Manzano, J. I., Castro-Nunõ, M., López-Valpuesta, L., Sanz-Diáz, M. T., & Yñiguez, R. (2016). Measuring the effect of ARS on academic performance: A global meta-analysis. Computers and Education, 96, 109–121.

(2) Mimouni, A. (2022). Using Mobile gamified quizzing for active learning: the effect of reflective class feedback on undergraduates’ achievement. Education and Information Technologies, 1-24.