Writing Teacher Made Quizzes
There may be times when you just can’t wait for a quiz to be written by us, or the book you want quizzed is specialist to your school needs. You may also want to consider having students write quizzes as an extension exercise. With AR you can write your own quizzes called Teacher made quizzes.
Teacher made quizzes are Reading Practice Quizzes that teachers, librarians or other staff members add to Accelerated Reader. The software allows the creation of 500 teacher made Reading Practice Quizzes per school. The quiz numbers 900–1399 are reserved for these quizzes.
As preparation for creating a quiz, read several books written at the same readability level as the book for which you plan to write a quiz. Then take the matching Accelerated Reader Reading Practice Quizzes.
When writing a quiz think about these points:
- the book’s important events
- ask questions in a sequence that matches the events in the book
- write clear questions and answers
- make sure the incorrect answers are plausible and do not give away the correct answer easily
- use vocabulary that is about the same level of difficulty as the book
- ask other teachers to give the quiz a trial before releasing it for student use
You need to do a bit of research before writing your quiz:
- book level
- word count
To help determine the book level and word count, search for the book details on www.Amazon.com, you might just find the exact ATOS level and the number of words in the book. The AR software will automatically calculate the number of points a quiz is worth based on the word count and book level.
You will need to decide how long your quiz will be. It can be 5, 10 or 20 questions long. Consider book level and length when deciding how many questions to include.
Creating the Actual Quiz:
- Log into your AR Site with an account that has the privileges to Manage Quizzes, this is typically the AR Coordinator, Librarian or Administrator
- Select the Manage Quizzes link from the Accelerated Reader Tab
- Select Reading Practice
- Select View All Teacher Made Quizzes
- Select Add Teacher Made Quiz
- Enter the details of your book
- Write your quiz
- Remember to select the check box at the end that allows students to take the actual quiz
I fully support the request to be able to add more than 500 teacher/student written quizzes. At Central Coast Grammar School the Library Staff have written many quizzes over the years and having ‘maxed-out’ at 500, then have to delete quizzes in order to add quizzes for new, popular books that are not available from AR. The ability to add more than the allotted 500 would be the obvious answer. Thanks for your consideration to this request.
Gill,
The 500 Teacher Made Quiz cap was established by Renaissance Learning very early in the development of Accelerated Reader. Over the proceeding 20+ years that AR has been used around the world there has been only a few quests for the cap to be lifted. At this point in time the 500 Quiz Ca is still in place.
I have put a case to RL that the cap should be lifted. Effectively the request is being considered at the moment.
The answer wont come tomorrow, but the case is progressing along the development process for consideration.
I have now used all of the available numbers for teacher made quizzes. i have asked whether i coould purchase another 500 numbers from 1399 onwards to write further quizzes, but unfortunately was told “no”.
I would like Renaissance Learning to look at this possibility as a reward to schools who purchase $1000 worth of quizzes for instance.
Really good point
Trinidad,
I agree, students writing their own quizzes is great for extending reading into writing.
Cheers
David
I really like the idea of students writing their own quizzes, great for comprehension.