Partner Quiz Teaching Strategy

The Partner Quiz teaching strategy is an engaging and interactive test prep and review strategy that students enjoy. 


How Does This Partner Quiz Teaching Strategy Work?

  1. Prepare a bunch of notecards. Each one should have one question on the front and its answer on the back. There should be one card for every student. Alternatively, you can have students prepare these cards. 
  2. Pass out one card to each student.
  3. Have students pair up.  Pairs should face each other and hold their cards so that their partner can see the question side–i.e. Student A holds his card so that Student B can read the question and Student A can read the answer and vice versa.
  4. Student B responds to the question on Student A’s card. If Student B gets the question right, Student A praises Student B. If Student B gets the question wrong, Student A should help, coach, and prompt Student B until Student B gets the correct answer.
  5. The partners then switch roles and repeat step 4.
  6. When both questions have been asked and correctly answered, pairs should switch cards (Student A now has Student B’s card and Student B has Student A’s card) and find a new partner.
  7. Repeat steps 3 through 6 until students have partnered with everyone in the class (or until you are out of time).
  8. This could be done digitally using Google Meet/Zoom breakout rooms and digital task cards.

How Do I Use This Strategy?

  1. Review: Partner Quiz is a great way to begin reviewing for a quiz or test at the end of a unit.  I find it particularly useful to do before students try to fill out a study guide. Once students have been through an entire Partner Quiz activity, they rarely have much trouble filling out the study guide.
  2. The practice of newly-learned skills and ideas: On the cards write questions that ask the students to perform newly-learned skills. Skip homework and use this strategy with questions from the textbook. 

Why Do I Love This Strategy?

  1. Students see Partner Quiz as a game instead of work! Students get just as much practice doing this as they get if I assign work out of our textbook, but they see this activity as a fun non-homework game instead of just a run-of-the-mill homework assignment.
  2. Students are up and moving, but they are focused and directed every moment of it so are not off-topic.

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