In short
- A short quiz strengthens memory and tells you what to reteach tomorrow; a termly test measures and reports.
- Recalling something from memory helps people keep it longer than reading it again, especially when the recall is spread over days.
- Low stakes means the quiz does not count towards a grade, is short, and is followed by the right answers.
- Most classroom evidence comes from science and psychology classes in a few countries, so apply it to English reading with some care.
"Beat" needs a qualifier. A five-minute quiz after reading is better than a termly test at one thing: helping pupils remember what they read. It is not better at giving a fair, comparable score for a report. This article explains why short quizzes help memory, in plain words. It shows what a low-stakes quiz looks like in a reading class and what to do with the results. It also says where the evidence comes from, and what that means for an English class.
Do daily quizzes really beat termly tests?
For learning, yes: short, frequent, low-stakes quizzes help pupils remember more than a single test at the end of term. For measurement, no: a termly test is still the better tool for a fair score that you can compare across pupils and report. The two do different jobs. The claim in this article's title is about learning, not measurement.
The reason is simple. A quiz asks pupils to pull something out of memory, and that act of recall makes the memory stronger. A termly test does this too, but only once, and often weeks after the reading. A daily quiz does it many times, close to the reading, and shows you straight away what the class has not understood.
What is retrieval practice?
Retrieval practice means recalling something from memory instead of looking at it again. Answering a quiz question is retrieval. Rereading the text is not.
Roediger and Karpicke (2006) asked university students to study short prose passages. Some then reread the passages; others took recall tests without feedback. On a test five minutes later, rereading gave better recall. On tests two days and one week later, the students who had been tested remembered substantially more. Testing looked worse in the short run and better in the long run.
Karpicke and Roediger (2008) studied university students learning foreign language vocabulary. Once a student had got a word right, more study of that word had no effect on recall a week later. More testing of it had a large positive effect. The students' own predictions of how well they would do did not match their real results.
That last finding matters in class. Pupils often feel that rereading works, because the text feels familiar. Familiar is not the same as remembered. A quiz shows both you and the pupil what has really stuck.
Why spacing matters
Spacing means spreading practice over time instead of doing it all at once. Cepeda and colleagues (2006) combined 317 experiments on this in a review. They found that the best gap between practice sessions depends on how long you need to remember: the longer the retention period, the longer the best gap.
For a class, the lesson is that one long revision session before a test is a weak way to build memory. Short recall spread over days and weeks is stronger. Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) reviewed ten common study techniques. They rated only two as high utility: practice testing and distributed (spaced) practice. Rereading and highlighting were rated low. The same idea sits behind spaced repetition for vocabulary.
What low stakes means in practice
A low-stakes quiz is one where a wrong answer costs the pupil little. The point is to practise recall and to show gaps, not to judge. In practice, that means:
- The score does not count towards a report grade, or counts for very little.
- The quiz is short: a few questions, a few minutes.
- Pupils see the right answer straight after they answer.
- A poor score leads to more practice, not to a consequence.
- The quiz is routine, so it stops feeling like an event.
McDaniel and colleagues (2011) ran low-stakes multiple-choice quizzes with feedback in 8th-grade science classes in the United States. Content that had been quizzed was remembered better on the class unit exams, with gains of 13 to 25 percent. Review quizzes just before the unit exam gave the biggest gains. The benefit was still there on end-of-semester and end-of-year exams.
Black and Wiliam (1998) reviewed classroom research on formative assessment more broadly. They reported firm evidence that strengthening the frequent feedback pupils receive yields substantial learning gains. A daily quiz is one simple way to create that feedback. Formative Assessment for Reading in EFL covers the wider practice.
Daily quizzes and termly tests compared
| Short daily quiz | Termly test | |
|---|---|---|
| Main purpose | Strengthen memory; show what to reteach | Measure and report attainment |
| Timing | Straight after reading, several times a week | Once, at the end of a term or unit |
| Length | Three to six questions, about five minutes | Long, often a full lesson |
| Stakes | Low: little or nothing counts | Higher: counts for grades or reports |
| Feedback | Immediate, question by question | Delayed, often as a total score |
| Use of results | Change tomorrow's lesson | Report to pupils, parents and the school |
Keep both. The quiz does the daily teaching work; the test gives the summary. Problems start when a school has only the test, or when it turns every quiz into a mini-test with grades attached.
How a five-minute quiz after reading works
- Pupils finish the reading for the day.
- They answer a short set of questions without looking back at the text. Mix a plot question, a word question and a question on the point of the story.
- They see the right answer after each question, with a short reason.
- You look at the class results for each question, not only each pupil's total.
- Any question most of the class got wrong comes back tomorrow, asked a different way.
Classroom example
A B1 class reads a chapter in which a boy finds a lost wallet and returns it. The quiz has four questions: where he found the wallet, what "hesitated" means in the sentence "He hesitated at the door", why he returned it, and which sentence uses "return" correctly. Most pupils miss the "hesitated" question. The next day, the teacher opens with two new sentences from the chapter that use the word, and asks again.
How many questions is right depends on the level and the text. How Many Questions Should a Reading Quiz Have? looks at that. For writing the word questions, see How to Write Vocabulary-in-Context Questions.
What to do with the results
A quiz whose results nobody looks at still helps memory, but it wastes half its value. Use the results in three ways.
- By question. If most of the class missed a question, the problem is probably the teaching or the text, not the pupils. Reteach it.
- By pupil. If one pupil keeps missing questions the class gets right, check the level of the text for that pupil.
- By type. If word questions go well but questions on the point of the story go badly, spend more time discussing meaning.
Between sessions, pupils can keep practising on their own. Practice Questions Before a Quiz: What Helps explains what makes that practice useful.
Where the evidence comes from
Be clear about what the research does and does not show. Agarwal, Nunes and Blunt (2021) systematically reviewed 50 classroom experiments on retrieval practice. Most of the effects (57 percent) were medium or large, across many ages and subjects. But 35 of the 50 experiments were in science or psychology courses. None of the experiments that met their criteria involved foreign language learning. Only 6 percent were run outside Western, rich countries.
Much of the lab evidence, including the two Roediger and Karpicke studies above, comes from university students. McDaniel and colleagues (2011) worked with 8th-grade pupils, but in science. So the strongest evidence is not from English reading classes with 8 to 16 year olds learning a foreign language.
What does that mean for you? The basic mechanism, that recall strengthens memory, has been found with many kinds of material, including foreign language vocabulary in the lab. It is reasonable to expect it to help pupils remember words and story events. But nobody has shown exactly how large the benefit is in an EFL reading class. Treat quizzes as a well-supported bet, and watch your own class results.
How iRead handles this
In iRead, a quiz runs after every session, and practice questions are available between sessions. The questions are generated from the story itself: its real sentences, its grammar, its plot and its moral. Every quiz answer feeds a progress record for each word, and teachers see retention per word and per class.
The core principle: Use short, frequent quizzes to build memory and guide tomorrow's lesson. Keep the termly test for measuring and reporting.
See it in iRead: A quiz runs after every iRead session, built from the story's own sentences, grammar, plot and moral, with practice questions between sessions.
See how it worksKey takeaway
Daily quizzes beat termly tests for learning because each one makes pupils recall what they read, spread over time. They do not replace the termly test as a measure. Use both, and act on the quiz results.
Frequently asked questions
Should daily quiz scores count towards grades?
Mostly no. A quiz works best when a wrong answer costs little, so pupils treat it as practice. If you must record it, give it a very small weight. Keep grades for the termly test, which is built to measure fairly.
Is rereading the text not just as good as a quiz?
Not for long-term memory. In Roediger and Karpicke (2006), rereading gave better recall five minutes later, but students who had been tested remembered more after two days and a week. Rereading makes a text feel familiar, which is not the same as remembering it.
How long should a daily reading quiz be?
About five minutes is a good target: a handful of questions that cover the plot, a few words and the point of the story. The aim is recall and a quick picture of the class, not a full measure of reading ability.
Do frequent quizzes make pupils anxious?
They do not have to. Keep the score out of grades, show the right answer straight away, and make the quiz a routine rather than an event. Some pupils will still feel nervous, so watch for them and explain that the quiz is practice, not a judgement.
Does the research apply to young EFL learners?
Partly. The memory effect has been found with many ages and materials, but most classroom studies are in science and psychology, and few are with young foreign language learners. It is a reasonable bet for reading classes, not a proven result, so watch your own class data.
Sources
- Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x
- Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966-968. doi.org/10.1126/science.1152408
- Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354-380. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354
- Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 5(1), 7-74. doi.org/10.1080/0969595980050102
- Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266
- McDaniel, M. A., Agarwal, P. K., Huelser, B. J., McDermott, K. B., & Roediger, H. L. (2011). Test-enhanced learning in a middle school science classroom: The effects of quiz frequency and placement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(2), 399-414. doi.org/10.1037/a0021782
- Agarwal, P. K., Nunes, L. D., & Blunt, J. R. (2021). Retrieval practice consistently benefits student learning: A systematic review of applied research in schools and classrooms. Educational Psychology Review, 33(4). doi.org/10.1007/s10648-021-09595-9