In short
- Show the right answer after every practice question; without it, pupils can remember their wrong answers.
- Spread short practice over several days instead of one long session the night before.
- Ask new questions about the same words and sentences from the reading, not the same questions again.
- Low-stakes practice can make pupils less nervous about the real quiz, though not every pupil.
Between one reading lesson and the next quiz, pupils can practise. That practice can build real memory for the story's words and events, or it can simply teach pupils the answers to a few questions. The difference lies in how it is set up. This article covers five features of useful practice: feedback, spacing, short sessions, re-asking what was missed, and new questions on the same text. It also covers test anxiety and the limits of practice.
Do practice questions before a quiz help?
Yes, if they are set up well. Practice questions help pupils remember what they read when each answer is followed by feedback, when practice is spread over several days, and when the questions are new ones about the same text. Practice on the same few questions, repeated until pupils know the answers, can raise quiz scores without deeper learning.
Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) reviewed ten common study techniques and rated practice testing as one of only two with high utility. The other was spreading practice over time. The rest of this article turns those two findings into classroom routines.
Give feedback after every answer
Multiple-choice practice has a hidden risk. Every wrong option is a piece of wrong information. A pupil who picks a wrong option, and is never told, may remember it as right.
Butler and Roediger (2008) tested this with 72 university students. After reading passages, students took a multiple-choice test with immediate feedback, delayed feedback or no feedback. Compared with no feedback, both kinds of feedback raised correct answers on a later test. They also reduced the number of wrong options that students repeated. The authors concluded that teachers should give feedback when they use multiple-choice tests.
Not all feedback is equal. Hattie and Timperley (2007) reviewed research on feedback in schools. They found that its effect can be positive or negative, and that the type of feedback and the way it is given make a difference. For practice questions, keep feedback short and about the task: the right answer, and one line on why.
Classroom example
A pupil chooses "angry" for the word "nervous" in the sentence "Tom was nervous before his first match." The feedback reads: "Not quite. The answer is 'worried'. Tom is worried because it is his first match." The pupil sees the right word and the clue in the sentence.
Spread practice over days, not the night before
Ten minutes of practice spread over three days is worth more than thirty minutes the night before. Cepeda and colleagues (2006) reviewed 317 experiments on spacing. They found that spaced practice supports memory, and that the best gap between sessions grows with how long you need to remember.
For a reading class, the practical version is simple. Set a few practice questions on the day of the reading, a few the next day, and a few just before the quiz. The same idea underpins spaced repetition for vocabulary.
Classroom example
Monday: the class reads chapter 3 in class. Pupils answer five practice questions that evening, with the answer shown after each one.
Tuesday: four new questions on the same chapter, including the two words most pupils missed on Monday, asked in a different form.
Wednesday: no practice. The gap spreads the practice out across the week.
Thursday: three short questions just before the session, then the quiz on chapter 3, written with new questions on the same text.
The Wednesday gap is deliberate. It spreads practice across the week, which is what the spacing research supports. It also stops practice from feeling like a nightly chore.
Keep it short and re-ask what was missed
A practice session should take five to ten minutes. Short sessions are easier to repeat, and repetition over days is what builds memory. A routine that works:
- Set four to six questions on the day's reading.
- Show the right answer and a short reason after each one.
- Keep a note of which questions each pupil missed.
- The next day, ask about the missed words and events again, in a new question.
- Stop re-asking a point once the pupil gets it right on two different days.
A wrong answer is not wasted if feedback follows. Richland, Kornell and Kao (2009) asked university students questions about a text before they read it. Even questions the students got wrong led to better recall of that information than extra reading time did. The study used undergraduates and one science essay, so treat it as encouraging rather than proof for young readers. The practical point: do not hide hard questions from pupils for fear they will fail.
The same study also found that the benefit did not spread to information that had not been asked about. Practice helps what is practised. So cover the words and events that matter most.
New questions on the same words, not the same questions
If a pupil answers the same question five times, the fifth right answer may show only that they remember the question. A new question about the same word or event checks whether they know the word itself. This is a reasoning point rather than a tested finding, but it follows from how memory for a specific item works.
| Same questions repeated | New questions on the same text | |
|---|---|---|
| What the pupil practises | Recognising a known question and its answer | Recalling the word or event in a new form |
| What a high score shows | Memory for those questions | Memory for the words and the story |
| Risk | Scores rise faster than learning | Takes more work to write |
| Example | The same gap-fill on "nervous" each day | A gap-fill, then a meaning question, then a correct-use question on "nervous" |
Keep the practice tied to the reading. Use the same words and sentences from the story, then vary the question form. How to Write Vocabulary-in-Context Questions shows three forms you can rotate.
Can practice lower test anxiety?
It can, for many pupils. Agarwal and colleagues (2014) surveyed 1,408 pupils aged 11 to 18 in one US school district. All had taken regular low- or no-stakes quizzes with immediate feedback in at least one class. Of those who answered, 72 percent said the quizzes made them less nervous for unit tests and exams.
Read that result with care. It is self-reported, from one district, and the pupils had all taken part in quizzing research. When asked to compare with their other classes, 19 percent reported more anxiety in the class with quizzes. So low-stakes practice seems to calm most pupils, but not all.
- Keep practice scores out of grades.
- Show the right answer straight away, so a mistake is corrected at once.
- Make practice a routine, so the real quiz feels familiar.
- Watch for the pupils who still find it stressful, and talk to them.
The limits of practice
Practice is not a substitute for reading. Questions can only reinforce what pupils met in the text. A pupil who has not read the chapter will learn a few answers, not the story.
Practice should also cover the whole quiz, not only vocabulary. If the quiz will ask about the plot, the grammar in the story and its point, the practice should touch all four. Otherwise pupils get good at one kind of question and meet the others cold.
Practice scores can also mislead you. A class that scores well on practice may simply know the practice questions. The real quiz tells you more if it asks new questions about the same text. For how practice fits the wider week, see Why Short Daily Quizzes Beat Termly Tests and Formative Assessment for Reading in EFL.
Finally, most of the studies here used university students or secondary pupils in science and psychology. None was an EFL reading class. The principles are well supported, but how much they help your pupils is something to check in your own results.
How iRead handles this
In iRead, practice questions are available between sessions, and a quiz runs after every session. Questions are generated from the story: its real sentences, its grammar, its plot and its moral. Every quiz answer feeds one progress record per word, and a word cleared on two different days is marked Mastered.
The core principle: Practise little and often, give the answer after every question, and ask new questions about the same words instead of repeating old ones.
See it in iRead: iRead offers practice questions between sessions and a quiz after every session, all generated from the story's own sentences, grammar, plot and moral.
See how it worksKey takeaway
Useful practice is short, spread over days, followed by feedback and built from new questions on the same text. Repeating the same questions raises scores faster than it raises learning.
Frequently asked questions
How much practice should pupils do before a reading quiz?
A few short sessions are better than one long one. Five to ten minutes on the day of the reading, again the next day, and again just before the quiz is a sensible pattern. Spacing the sessions matters more than the total time.
Should practice questions be the same as the quiz questions?
No. Use the same words, sentences and events from the reading, but write new questions. If practice and quiz questions are identical, a high quiz score may show only that pupils remember the questions, not that they understood the story.
Is it harmful for pupils to get practice questions wrong?
Not if they see the right answer straight after. Without feedback, pupils can remember a wrong option as correct. With feedback, a wrong answer becomes a chance to learn the right one, as Butler and Roediger (2008) found with multiple-choice tests.
Does practice reduce test anxiety for every pupil?
No. In a large survey of pupils who had regular low-stakes quizzes, most said the quizzes made them less nervous about exams, but a minority reported more anxiety. Keep stakes low, give answers straight away, and watch for pupils who still find it stressful.
Sources
- Butler, A. C., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). Feedback enhances the positive effects and reduces the negative effects of multiple-choice testing. Memory & Cognition, 36(3), 604-616. doi.org/10.3758/MC.36.3.604
- Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81-112. doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487
- Richland, L. E., Kornell, N., & Kao, L. S. (2009). The pretesting effect: Do unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance learning?. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15(3), 243-257. doi.org/10.1037/a0016496
- Agarwal, P. K., D'Antonio, L., Roediger, H. L., McDermott, K. B., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Classroom-based programs of retrieval practice reduce middle school and high school students' test anxiety. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 3(3), 131-139. doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2014.07.002
- 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
- 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