Tests = stress, but maybe there’s a better way to create them…
My grade 11 class is studying the Renaissance, and we have been busy taking notes from the videos we’ve been watching that help us understand the era. To reduce stress, I asked my students to create 3 questions and their corresponding answers from their notes, and plug them into a Google Form that I shared with them.
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Students claimed certain questions by watching responses come in on our Smartboard (I love the spreadsheet answers available from Google Forms). When everyone had a chance to contribute their ideas, we sat down and discussed every question and answer.
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For most students, this was their first time contributing ideas for the creation of a test. We had a lot of decisions to make, including which questions to include and how best to cover the material. It was so interesting to talk about the style of our test questions: “Is it better to use a multiple choice question to cover Michelangelo’s use of frescoes, or should we use a true & false question?” “How should we cover the Medici family? A short answer, maybe?” “What if we could have a bonus question that asks people to explain why The School of Athens was seen as an ‘intellectual fantasy gathering’?”…
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Northern Art Teacher 
What a terrific idea, and one I may borrow for some history thinking. Yet another way to make students’ learning visible, have them share what they know, and have them decide what the really important info was. My next question becomes….could this activity be the assessment?
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