More low stakes assignments (e.g. lots of quizzes, mini tests, etc.) are preferred to fewer high stakes assignments (e.g. one midterm and a final). No assignment should be worth more than 20% of one’s final grade.

Low stakes assignments are preferred for a variety of reasons:

• Less stress on the student (a single quiz doesn’t matter that much)
• Opportunities to assess different skills (morphological composition one day, comprehension another day)
• Relieving the excused absence policy (more quizzes means you can drop a few and not worry about, say, officially approved doctor’s notes as you otherwise might)
• Window into how your students are doing right now in a way you can’t when giving fewer graded assignments. (After giving the quiz, throw a blank quiz up on the DocuCam and go over it as a class together.)

To read more about the reasons for low stakes assignments, see here.

This is relevant to the language classroom especially in the case of quizzes, which we should give regularly, if not daily or almost daily. I present them as an extension of the students’ homework so, effectively, a reward for completing the assignment. Realistically, I know that students won’t always learn what I need them to learn if I don’t formally quiz them on it.

Test morphology over and over again. Acing a morph quiz one day doesn’t mean they remember that morph the next day. And test vocab! If you don’t, they won’t learn it.

Some standard sample quizzes