Is Your Friday Looking a Little Freaky? Give Your Students an Un-Quiz!
- Dustin Rimmey
- Mar 6
- 4 min read
So, the vibes at school are very weird today. Students know that after today, they only have four days until break. The weather is supposed to be stormy this morning, beautiful this afternoon, and stormy again after dinner. There's also a lot of buzz surrounding our Girls' Basketball team making it to the next round of the playoffs, and they play tonight. So an idea with very little context popped into my head during my planning period, so I embraced the chaos and weird vibes of the day, and here's what we went with.
The Un-Quiz!
I had several students who were in the same spot in a Biology class, and instead of having them take their computerized quiz for the day, here's what I did. I gave them the answer key...in order. Their task was to write questions appropriate for the answer. However, instead of basically force-feeding them a reverse-engineered "DIY Jeopardy" activity, we embraced the weird vibes! Here's the example we started with:
Our first answer was mitochondria. Instead of writing "what is the powerhouse of the cell" as our first question (because that's all any of us who don't teach science remember to this day), we got weird.
The question we ended up creating was "What would a cell lose if it suddenly went on a permanent energy strike?"
Here's what we created by the end of the hour:
The Answer | The "Reverse" Question (Student Created) |
1. Nucleus | "Who is the 'Main Character' of the cell that keeps a diary of everyone's genetic secrets?" |
2. Mitochondria | This was our example question |
3. Cell Membrane | "Who is the picky bouncer at the club who decides which molecules are 'cool enough' to enter?" |
4. Vacuole | "If the cell had an attic or a basement to store all its old 'luggage' and water, what would it be called?" |
5. Ribosomes | "Who are the tiny construction workers constantly building protein skyscrapers from a set of blueprints?" |
6. Chloroplast | "Which part of the plant cell is basically a chef that only knows how to cook with sunlight?" |
7. Cytoplasm | "What is the 'jelly' that keeps all the organs from crashing into each other when the cell starts dancing?" |
8. Lysosome | "Who is the designated 'clean-up crew' that dissolves the cell's trash so it doesn't get cluttered?" |
9. Cell Wall | "What is the suit of armor that plant cells wear because they don't have bones to hold them up?" |
10. Golgi Apparatus | "Which part of the cell acts like the Post Office, boxing up proteins and putting a 'priority shipping' label on them?" |
We had fun! We were laughing, and we harnessed the weird vibes to try something weird! My students who were in similar subject clusters decided they want to try to be at a similar stopping point by the end of next week (or the week after break), so they can do something similar!
Is this strategy pedagogically sound?
It is very important not to be weird, just for weirdness' sake. So here I am during my 2nd plan for the day and reflecting on the lesson, and here is why my random thought actually has value in the approach:
1. It Moves Up Bloom’s Taxonomy
In traditional testing, students often sit at the "Remember" or "Understand" levels. By flipping the script, you force them into "Create" and "Analyze."
The Shift: To write a "Reverse Question" for the Mitochondria, a student can't just recognize the word. They have to analyze its function (energy), its relationship to the whole (powering the cell), and then create a metaphor (a battery) that bridges the two.
2. It Reveals "Shadow Misconceptions."
Standard multiple-choice questions can be guessed. A student might pick "Cell Membrane" because they recognize the word "barrier."
The Why: If a student writes a question like "Who is the solid brick wall that nothing can get through?" for the Cell Membrane, you’ve caught a misconception. You now know they don't understand semi-permeability. Their "creative" question reveals exactly where their logic is fuzzy.
3. It Lowers "Affective Filter."
The "Affective Filter" is a psychological barrier that goes up when students are stressed, bored, or feeling "weird vibes."
The Why: Because the Un-Quiz feels like a game or a creative writing prompt, students who usually shut down during science or math relax. They stop worrying about "the right answer" and start focusing on "the best description," which ironically leads them to the right answer anyway.
What's the next iteration? The Un-Quiz 2.0 and 3.0
If I were teaching in a traditional classroom, and not a recovery setting, here's what I would do after we had a few solid reps of the un-quiz under our belts.
In version 2.0, we'd swap quizzes. Instead of working down the vocab list and creating weird or freaky questions, students would write their quiz questions as a group, and then they would switch with another group! That way, we can test the effectiveness of our questions and see if they connect to knowledge more universally!
In version 3.0, maybe we get a little weird. Maybe we gamify it. Maybe we can add a puzzle element. Who knows!
Do you have a weird assessment strategy you want to share? Do you have a similar experience of sharing the equivalent of a shower thought and turning it into lesson content the same day? Let me know, let's share, lets get weird!
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