How to Use Quizzes for Test Review (A One-Week Plan)

The usual test review is a worksheet, a slideshow, or a teacher at the board asking "any questions?" to a silent room. Students who already understand nod along. Students who do not understand are not sure what to ask, so they say nothing and find out on test day.

Quizzes fix part of that, because they force every student to commit to an answer and show you, quickly, what they actually know. But a single quiz the day before the test is not a review plan. This post lays out a week of short sessions that builds on itself, using Kwizzy for the quizzes. The structure works with any tool, and it also works if you only have three days.

Start by finding out what is weak

Review time is short, so spend it where it counts. Begin with a diagnostic: a short quiz, taken a few days before the test, whose only job is to show you where the gaps are.

Keep it to ten questions, drawn from every part of the test and not just the parts you enjoyed teaching. If you wrote the test, pull the diagnostic questions from the same list of skills. Students should not be graded on it. Tell them that plainly: "This does not count. It shows us what to practise."

You can set the diagnostic as homework, so it does not eat class time. Students open a link, enter a nickname, and answer at their own pace. They see whether each answer was right straight away, and you see each nickname's score. If you have the paid report, you also see how each question went across the class. If you do not, ask students to raise a hand when they hear a question they missed, which tells you nearly as much.

The one thing you are looking for is the questions most of the class missed. Write down the top three topics. Those are your review.

Practice the weak spots, not everything

With the top three topics in hand, build or borrow a short quiz for each. For a maths unit on proportional reasoning, the library quiz Ratios, Rates and Percentages is a ready-made starting point. For a biology unit, Photosynthesis and Cellular Respiration covers a topic where students often mix up the inputs and outputs. For history, The Industrial Revolution suits a unit review.

A library quiz rarely matches your unit exactly. Play it yourself first and note the questions that do not fit what you taught. Tell students which question numbers to skip, or use the library quiz for the topics it does match and write a few questions of your own for the rest.

Short, repeated practice usually beats one long session. Five questions on one topic, three days in a row, is a better use of ten minutes than thirty questions once. The reason is simple: students who have to pull an idea out of memory a few times remember it better than students who reread it.

Make the explanation do the teaching

The point of a review quiz is not the score. It is the moment a student gets something wrong and learns why. So spend your preparation time on explanations, not on decorating the quiz.

For every question your diagnostic showed to be hard, write a one- or two-sentence explanation. Say why the right answer is right, and where the common wrong answer goes astray. In Kwizzy, an explanation shows up when the answer is revealed in a live game, and straight after a student answers in homework, so it lands at the moment they are paying attention. It can be up to 500 characters, which is enough for the reason and no more.

A good explanation names the mistake. "Photosynthesis takes in carbon dioxide and gives out oxygen. Respiration does the opposite, which is why the two get swapped" says more than "The answer is B".

Run one live review game

Two days before the test, play one live game. This is where the energy comes from, and a bit of competition keeps students engaged for twenty minutes of review they would otherwise endure.

1. Choose or build a quiz of eight to twelve questions that mixes your weak topics.
2. Start a live game from your teacher account and put the code on the projector.
3. Decide on teams. Teams are good for review, because students argue about answers before they commit. Turn on team mode, pick two to four teams, and the class is divided as they join.
4. Leave the streak bonus on if you want the competitive edge, or turn it off if you worry that a student who misses one question will feel the game is lost.
5. After every question, stop on the reveal. Ask a student to explain the right answer in their own words, then read the explanation if you wrote one. If most of the room missed the question, spend a full minute there.
6. At the end, name the two questions that went worst. Those are tonight's homework.

The pause on the reveal is the whole value of the game. A review game that runs at full speed from question to question is entertainment, and students will remember who won rather than what they learned.

Close the gaps with homework

The night before, set a short homework quiz built from the questions the live game exposed. Keep it to five or six questions and set the deadline so students can do it after dinner. Tell them how it will be used: "This is the last check before the test. Anything you get wrong, read the explanation, then bring it to class tomorrow."

The next morning, spend the first five minutes on whatever students missed most. If you gave the homework a day earlier, you have the answers already, so the five minutes go to the questions that matter.

What not to do

Do not turn review into a high-stakes quiz. The reason this works is that wrong answers are safe. If scores go in the gradebook, students will guess less honestly, copy more, and stop telling you what they do not understand.

Do not review everything. A wide, shallow review of every topic leaves the weak ones weak. Pick three and go deep.

Do not rely on the leaderboard to tell you who understands. A fast student who guesses can outscore a careful student who is right. Use the leaderboard for fun and the explanations and your own observation for teaching.

And do not run a live game in the last five minutes of the period with nothing planned for the reveals. If there is not time to talk about the answers, there is not time for a live game. Use homework instead.

Where to go from here

Everything in this plan works with a free teacher account and the free library: diagnostic homework, a live review game with teams, and a closing homework quiz. If you want to write your own questions faster, or see how each question went after every game and homework, the pricing page lays out what the paid plans add.