Test Before You Teach
Quiz students on material before you teach it. Triggering the feeling of not knowing primes attention and improves retention. Students who struggle before instruction remember the answer better.
The strategy, as published
Exactly as it appears on the card
Part of Students as Owners of Their Learning in 02 Formative Assessment, where it sits alongside its neighbouring strategies, the infographic and the thinking for the whole area.
Why you might use it
The problem it may help with
Putting a question to a class questions they cannot yet be expected to answer looks pointless. The card's mechanism says otherwise: triggering the feeling of not knowing primes attention for the explanation that follows, and pupils who struggle towards an answer before instruction remember the real one better.
There is a second yield for the teacher: the pre-quiz shows you what the class already knows, and which misconceptions are arriving with them, before you decide where the teaching needs its weight.
What it might look like
One version of it, in a classroom
Before a unit on electricity, a short ungraded quiz asks pupils to predict what happens to bulbs in series and parallel circuits. The wrong predictions surface the familiar current-gets-used-up idea, and the first lesson is built to confront it.
Try it
A way to begin
Open your next new topic with five questions pupils cannot yet be expected to answer, framed exactly that way: you are not supposed to know this yet; have a go anyway.
What to notice
Reading what happens
- How the same questions land after the teaching. The before-and-after pair is the clearest picture of what the unit added.
- Whether the framing holds. If pupils experience the pre-quiz as a test, the low stakes are gone and so is the willingness to guess.
Things to think about
Before and while you use it
- The mechanism runs on struggle, so failing at the start has to be explicitly safe. That is set by how you introduce it and how you react to the wrong answers, not by the quiz itself.
The wider thinking
Where the evidence sits
Pre-testing belongs to Bjork's family of desirable difficulties; Wiliam's interest is in the same activity read as evidence of where learners are before the teaching starts. The card’s attribution stands as published: Bjork, Wiliam.
The fuller picture, sources included, is in further reading and evidence for Formative Assessment.
Keep exploring
Where next?
Back to this strategy in 02 Formative Assessment, across to what you're trying to improve, or into all 144 at once.
Want to take this further?
Support is available
Pedagogy First gives you a starting point. If you want support exploring how approaches like this can work across your school, trust or professional learning programme, that work is available.