At Tyndale Primary School, we explicitly teach our pupils ‘Study Skills’ to improve organisation, enable increased retention of knowledge and promote efficient time management so that our pupils get the ‘best chance of success’ in their primary education and are fully prepared to effectively transition into their secondary school careers. 

Self quizzing

All pupils from Years 2 - 6 are provided with a planner to record their daily reading log, spelling practice and self-quizzing in. Their planner is a compulsory item and it is an expectation that pupils bring their planner to school every day.

What is self quizzing?

Pupils answer 3 - 5 self quizzing questions daily based on the new learning they've covered in their lessons that day, which are based on a subject specific knowledge organiser and vary in difficulty according to their command word (e.g. identify, describe or explain).

Why is self quizzing important?

Reviewing notes in detail following each lesson, or at minimum sometimes during the day before going to bed, will greatly increase pupils' ability to recall what they have learned.

At the end of nine weeks, pupils who have reviewed their notes within a day recalled about 75% of what they had been taught. Pupils who did not review their notes following their class were not even able to recall 50% of the information covered during the lesson after one day and only slightly more than 20% of the information nine weeks later.

How to self quiz

Teachers select their questions and pupils learn to compose their questions based on three levels of difficulty. When pupils become more competent using knowledge organisers they can start quizzing themselves.

A good study habit is to have a mixture of these three types of difficulty questions and that the questions are carefully selected to target the areas pupils do not fully understand.

Easy

(What is…)

What is a multiple?

What is a square number?

What is a prime number?

You could use a key word section on your knowledge organiser to answer these types of questions. 

Medium

(Describe…)

Describe the purpose of a comma?

Describe the role of a fronted adverbial?

Describe the features of persuasive language?

Using the subject specific content covered in your lesson you can add more information to your ‘what is’ question.

Challenging

(Explain how…)

Explain how the product of two prime numbers multiplied together aren’t always a prime number?

Explain why a square number is called a ‘square’?

Explain why 1 isn’t a prime number?

These questions require you to go into more detail by providing a context and explaining the 'why' to deepen your understanding and link and build your new knowledge together with prior knowledge.

What does this look like?

An example of a self quizzing lesson we would teach pupils in September when they first get their planners can be found here.