Prepare Yourself With a Pre-quiz

Some intimidating mathematical notation

I used to work for a large company that held quarterly gatherings, part bonding exercise, part team alignment. Our director loved the kind of corporate personality tools that yielded a four-color pie chart explaining your work style or four-letter acronym describing your personality. Every retreat included at least one similar exercise. One year, we focused on discovering our work styles – under stress. At first I thought it was silly, but I actually found the results quite valuable. Up until then, I hadn’t known that people think and function differently when they’re under duress. Now I notice it in myself all the time. For example, I have trouble reading when there’s time pressure, I can’t make a decision when I

"Bob's work style is green, but when he's stressed, he's a purple."

get overwhelmed, and as I noticed when I started grad school, I can’t take in new information when I’m already confused.

In the Computer Science program at NYU Tandon, Design and Analysis of Algorithms is a requirement. If you don’t do well enough in it, you have to retake it until you do, or else you can’t graduate. That’s a lot of pressure! The course also requires an understanding of math and mathematical notation that can be intimidating, at least for me. My Algorithms professor, Dr. Linda Sellie, was very aware of the fear her students had for the material, so she structured her lessons to try to keep everyone calm. Besides being organized and kind, she also used a method that I found very beneficial – a pre-quiz.

A pre-quiz is exactly what it sounds like, a quiz you take before you cover the material. In this case, Dr. Sellie’s quiz tested prerequisite knowledge that the upcoming lecture would require. Although it was multiple choice, the questions were often very difficult, and I would usually have to pull out my math textbook to review before I could finish it. The thing that kept it from being stressful was that we had ten tries to answer correctly, and if nothing else, that was enough to use the process of elimination to get it right. (And then learn why the answer was correct, of course.) Plus, the quiz was due the morning of the lecture, so there wasn’t any temptation to try to wait and finish it during class.

For me, the real magic of the Algorithms pre-quiz wasn’t the quiz itself, it was having the opportunity to panic, review, and remember information on my own time, when I wasn’t also trying to take notes on new material. I actually felt prepared during the lecture, primed to think in mathy ways even when we moved onto fresh and unfamiliar topics. So much of my experience of learning has been convincing myself that I’m capable of learning, and the pre-quiz gave me the confidence to think I could be successful that week. It’s only one way to ease students into difficult material, of course, but if you’re about to introduce a heavy subject, consider giving your students a chance to pre-process in their own time, with a pre-quiz.