Inclusive formative assessment design can support learning objectives and engagement opportunities in lectures, seminars or labs. Designing lower stakes assessment strategies requires a holistic approach to design that includes students who may have accommodations or other support needs. Pop quiz alternatives will be discipline and context specific. The suggestions provided are meant to support teaching teams to start conversations in terms of overall formative assessment goals and the alignment to learning outcomes for the course. The Centre for Pedagogical Innovation is happy to meet with faculty and members of the teaching team (TAs, marker graders) to discuss implementation of these strategies for specific course context.
Scheduled quizzes
Supporting formative assessments through scheduled quizzes can help support engagement with the topic as well as knowledge translation and transfer. Scheduled quizzes will also decrease the anxiety that a pop quiz creates that in turn can impact student engagement with the remainder of the class and ability to retain or understand the topic of the day following the quiz as student cortisol levels have increase from academic stressors. Students should also be made aware of the assessments that are part of the course and when they will be scheduled as per section 10.1.3 of the faculty handbook.
Choice of topic quizzes
Provide students with the choice of topics that the quizzes could be about. For example, note 3 to 4 topics that could be part of a short lower stakes quiz and allow students to focus on the topics that are most meaningful to them in the quiz.
Reflection pieces
Leave 10 minutes at the end of class for end of class reflections on the learning of the day. These reflection pieces can be done in written format or you could encourage students to draw or graph their learning depending on your course content and context. These can also be used to determine gaps in awareness or knowledge to be reinforced in the next lecture or seminar. These reflections could then be summarized in future class discussions.
Exit Tickets
Similarly exit tickets can be used to support learning and engagement along with next steps. The format of the exit ticket will be specific to the course context and content, however, examples of exit tickets can be one question that is based on lecture or lab content for the day. These exit tickets can be done as a one question quiz in Brightspace that is open for a short period of time at the end of class time, or done using Microsoft Forms to record the student name (they should be logged into their Brock Microsoft account).
Peer quizzes
Low-stakes quizzes can be designed into the lecture or seminar time as a peer exchange of information where they work with peers or groups to answer the questions provided. This can be done in two stages where they work on the quiz questions alone and then partner with a peer to see if their answers are similar and what they would think the best answer would be based on their discussions.
Answers in Search of Questions
Teaching team members provide answers to students and their role is to formulate different questions that would lead to answers you have provided. This can be done independently or in groups in order to present the best questions that would lead to the answers provided to their peers. This kind of formative assessment can also lead to gamified participation as noted below.
Gamified Participation
In a gamified participation model, the questions provided by the teams (such as the questions created in relation to “answers in search of questions” model above) or clarifying questions that relate to course topics for example, can then be “upvoted” by students through the use of Microsoft Forms as a polling tool. Leaderboards can be created over the term to determine which teams or individuals have the most upvoted questions. The groups or individuals with most upvoted questions can then be rewarded with the opportunity to create a question that will appear on the midterm or final exam of the course.
Daily KWL
Students can create KWL charts at the end of class. A KWL chart emphasizes the following:
- Know: What the students knew when they came to class
- Want to know: What the students came to class wanting to find out
- Learned: What the students learned in class or lab that day
This allows both the students and the teaching team to see their progression in terms of learning and course concepts.
Classroom Response
Similar to Gamified Participation strategies above, classroom response tools give the instructor an opportunity to check-in with their students throughout the class to assess whether course concepts are being clearly understood, how they are feeling, or on a variety of other prompts. Using Microsoft Forms or MS Teams Polls can give real-time feedback to both instructors and students that can be valuable for their learning and often done right within the presentation slides themselves. There are other classroom response tools like clickers, Top Hat, Mentimeter, and Poll Everywhere that are sometimes available as free options with limited functionality or can be purchased by the instructor or with costs to the students. Any costs to the students need to be communicated in advance and “not normally, exceed $75.00 in charge to the student for a half credit course and should not exceed $100.00 for a full credit course.”
Resources and Literature on Pop Quizzes and Alternatives
N.B. You will notice that some of these resources on pop quizzes are more than 20 years old, as peer-reviewed research on pop quizzes has not been done as recently as pop quizzes are very content-specific assessments and tend to measure recall outcomes which many disciplines have moved away from as an outcome in favour of application and integration assessments.
Duong, D. (2021). Should medical educators rethink on-the-spot quizzing? Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), 193(30), E1182–E1183. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.1095954
Hampel, R. L. (2014). The Final Three Minutes with 100 Undergraduates. College Teaching, 62(2), 77–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2013.803950
Khanna, M. M. (2015). Ungraded Pop Quizzes: Test-Enhanced Learning Without All the Anxiety. Teaching of Psychology, 42(2), 174–178. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628315573144
Khanna, M. M., & Cortese, M. J. (2016). The Benefits of Quizzing in Content-Focused Versus Skills-Focused Courses. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 2(1), 87–97. https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000051
Le, M.-L. (2012). The use of anonymous pop-quizzes (APQs) as a tool to reinforce learning. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 100(4), 316–319. https://doi.org/10.3163/1536-5050.100.4.017
Myers, K. L. (1988). Twenty (Better) Questions. English Journal, 77(1), 64–65. https://doi.org/10.2307/818027
Rodriguez, M., le Roux, C., & Melville, M. (2024). Iteratively-Designed Exit Tickets Enhances Student Learning. College Teaching, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2024.2355210
Shehzad, U., Recker, M., & Clarke-Midura, J. (2025). Exploring the potential of exit tickets as formative assessments of student affect. Assessment in Education : Principles, Policy & Practice, 32(2), 173–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2025.2510206
Straley, H., & Dupee, L. (2017). One + One > Two: The Effects of Pair Quizzes on Student Attitudes and Perceptions. Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 7(2), 318–339. https://doi.org/10.5642/jhummath.201702.16
Thorne, B. (2000). Extra credit exercise: A painless pop quiz. Teaching of Psychology, 27(3), 204–205. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15328023TOP2703_09
Prepared by: Dr. Ann Gagné, Senior Educational Developer, Accessibility & Inclusion, Centre for Pedagogical Innovation and Student Accessibility Services. September 18, 2025.