Secondary school English teacher Lauran Hampshire-Dell was facing a problem. “I was teaching Jekyll and Hyde to a class of 21 Year 11 boys and they didn’t get it at all, didn’t think they were any good at English and so thought there was no point in trying.”
However, earlier that month at an Inset day, the teachers had been shown Quizlet, an online tool that allows teachers to incorporate interactive quizzes and tests in a variety of formats to supplement learning and was already being used by the school’s language department.
Lauran decided to try it out to see if it could help generate more interest in the lesson. She set a quiz on the first three chapters of Jekyll and Hyde, grouped the pupils into teams and put their scores on an interactive whiteboard so they could see who was winning. The impact was immediate.
“It was incredible. For the first time, I could see they were actually engaged in the lesson - I had them in the palm of my hand.” The reason for this, she says, is that combining a quiz and the scores on the leader board appealed directly to their competitive nature.
“They didn’t like not doing well. Losing at a quiz was like losing a sports match. It also really brought home to them - and me - that they needed to work harder. I told them I would be setting the same test next week and they came back and smashed it because they were determined to do better.”
Using Quizlet to build confidence
For Lauran, it was the breakthrough she needed as she realised that this focus on low-stakes testing could be a good way to build confidence without undue pressure: “Together, we started tracking their scores on a spreadsheet and when they got over a certain score we would fill the box in green and they loved being able to see that and the progress they were making.”
She adds that this also helped change the feel of the class: “It became a much more collaborative atmosphere as they would have to discuss together what they thought the right answer was in their team and they’d be disagreeing and correcting one another and it was just great to see.”
Secondary school geography teacher Nic Ford is another who has seen how Quizlet can help motivate pupils that had previously proved hard to engage. “Pupils that would be last to hand their homework in are often the first to log in,” he notes.
He explains that he often sets up Quizlet Live sessions and can see when pupils join and that many are often using it outside of lesson times such as on the bus home: “I’ve even seen a couple of students using it during the summer holidays,” he says.
Nic too says that the competitive element is often what appeals strongly to pupils: “They can setup up their own Quizlet Live sessions and compete against each other and this makes it easier for students that are not as motivated to study using traditional methods to learn.”
He says this ability for pupils to “study by stealth” is one of the key benefits of Quizlet as they start to learn and understand core terminology, such as longshore drift, so they are better able to understand questions they may face in a class or exam. “Quizlet can be a very powerful tool for building this fluency and embedded memory,” Nic adds.
Using Quizlet to build conceptual understanding
Lauran, too, is a big fan of the ability to set tests on vocabulary and spelling in her English class, noting that it helped broaden their ability to answer exam questions. “They were saying afterwards they had been using words like ‘barbaric’ and ‘usurper’ [in the exam] and they would never have done this before.”
It’s not just simple fact and vocabulary tests that Quizlet can help with, though, with Lauran noting that there are all manner of quizzes on Quizlet that teachers can search for that focus on broader, conceptual understanding of topics.
“It was brilliant to see them engage with these quizzes and it helped them really get to grips with Jekyll and Hyde. Once they’d done that it was amazing how quickly Macbeth [the text the class studied next] came to them,” she says.
Science teacher Adam Boxer also uses Quizlet and says it can prove useful for helping parents get involved in helping their child learn and potentially improving learning outcomes.
“Sometimes, you tell pupils that they need to revise a certain topic but they won’t do anything worthwhile. But if you have parents that want to support [their child] but don’t know how best to help, you can say ‘we have this Quizlet flashcard, test them for 20 minutes, ask these questions’ and so forth, that can be a powerful tool.”
Of course, no single tool is a panacea for student engagement issues and teachers will know well that what can work wonders for engaging some pupils proves ineffective for others.
Nevertheless, it’s clear from these teachers’ experiences that Quizlet can be a powerful platform to engage and inspire pupils that can otherwise prove hard to reach.
