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Elizabeth Washington
Elizabeth Washington
(Gainesville - United States)

Habits and Routines

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Students vote for review topics

Approaching a big exam, teachers often save some class time for review. Unfortunately, there are not usually good ways to determine which topics to cover with this limited time. With pure student suggestions, only the most vocal students will be served. If the teacher determines the agenda, he or she might miss things that are gaps for the students.

With Selectricity, teachers can setup an anonymous vote for students to provide feedback on which topics they need to review most.

Create a QuickVote

Visit Selectricity

Start at http://selectricity.org/

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Setup your vote and add the options

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Save the URL to share with students

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Voting

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Results

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The voting results are ordered using the Schulze Method so that the top choice is one which the most people have some interest in reviewing. This will maximize the value of review day among the students in the class.

There are many ways to structure a review day. A teacher might use the top few choices for whole-class review and then the later selections for self-selected group breakouts. Please feel free to edit this section with review activities that have worked in your classrooms!

Weaknesses

While QuickVote will allow teachers to get a better idea of which topics are troubling students the most, it doesn't solve some of the bigger problems with the classic Review Day. With very large exams (such as SAT, ACT, or state-mandated exams like MCAS in Massachusetts), there are too many topics to easily categorize on a QuickVote. Additionally, we still have

Some suggest using an "Other" option or "None of the Above" to give voters a chance to contest the construction of the ballot. Can you think of other solutions?