Test Review on the Move

 

To prepare students for an exam, the teacher sets up essay questions on posters around the room for students to review. The movement helps keep energy up at the end of the semester.

For this activity, students are expected to have knowledge of previous classes and to have completed the readings. The activity takes up a single class before an exam. This teaching fellow used the activity for Louis Hyman's course, "Rise and Fall of the Industrial US," but it can easily be adopted in many classes.

Before class, the teacher prepares six or seven essay questions and writes them on large poster boards. The students are broken up into groups and asked to move around the room, spending five minutes at each poster. During this time, they add questions, examples, quotations, and other ideas for the essay to each poster. The teacher alerts the students when it is time to move to the next poster. At the end of class, the teacher holds a question and answer session to address anything that came up during the activity and to go over exam strategies. 

Afterwards, the teacher types up the responses, correcting mistakes, and emails them out to the class. The activity helps students practice answering essay questions for exams and allows them to review a lot of material. Since students tend to have low energy during this time, moving around the room helps keep them engaged. The teacher must be very present, constantly moving around to prompt deeper thought, answer questions, etc.