Should 9.00 Add Post-Lecture Quizzes? MIT’s course 9.00 — Introduction to Psychological Science — is a relaxed and fun HASS class. Students learn the material through textbooks and lectures twice a week, then consolidate their knowledge in weekly recitations. The lectures are always interesting and interactive, but could they be further improved by adding daily quizzes? Researchers Keith B. Lyle and Nicole A. Crawford conducted a study to find out how such daily quizzes affected performance on exams in a college class, and the results were promising — students in the section with quizzes received significantly higher exam scores on average. Despite these results, I believe that the paper does not provide sufficient evidence for the addition of graded daily quizzes to 9.00 lectures, although the addition of ungraded daily quizzes is a possibility worth exploring. Keith B. Lyle and Nicole A. Crawford’s study’s focused on the hypothesis that “retrieving information from …show more content…
Namely, the study did not compare the effectiveness of PUREMEM to other forms of review, nor studied the effectiveness of PUREMEM when used in conjunction with other forms of review. The report does not mention if there were other resources available outside of lectures; likely there were not. Thus, the study was only able to conclude that having PUREMEM as the only form of review yielded better results than having no review at all. However, 9.00 has weekly recitations. While post-lecture quizzes in 9.00 may still produce benefits, it’s doubtful if these benefits will be nearly as significant as those shown in the study. It is possible that having any form of review — whether post-lecture quizzes or homework problems or recitations — will account for the difference in exam scores in the study, and that the addition of a second form of review will have little