How quiz helps your academic life?
Why do you think the concept of KBC has such a huge fan base? There are certain KBC questions that help us remember that info better than the regular textbooks we read every day. More than a game show, they are simply questions from our academics and daily life which help generate curiosity in us, the viewers, for finding the answers.
Quizzes help induce curiosity in us in the most plain to the hardest question existing. And curiosity helps us move away from the typical rote learning we encounter these days. Also, quizzes act as an ice-breaker and help us (especially students) improve our participation skills among students. It induces risk-taking skills within us with questions we don’t know the answer to but still, go for it to know the right answer, and improve our way of learning.
Taking a quiz or test helps us keep up with the topic we studied more efficiently and for a longer time. Hence, marks the retention of knowledge gained during the quiz is higher than in other plain methods making quizzes engaging to teach in a class for teachers.
And, the idea behind quizzes is to not win but to give an opportunity to apply and share knowledge with like-minded people. As an ice-breaker, quizzes offer critical thinking and extensive research helping students get into the habit of innovative learning from an early age.
I too was introduced to the idea of using flashcards and quizzes for self-study by my father since none of the tuition or school ways of teaching worked on me for certain subjects. Later on, in 2012 he started an Ed-tech foundation with the aim of delivering quality education to students in urban, rural, and tribal areas. Under this, he created “Quiz Academy”, a quiz portal based on our NCERT books. He and his team converted chapters from all subjects from grades 8th to 10th into multiple quizzes and it has been being used as a smart class system for the past 10 years in various schools, communities, and jails across India.
One such impactful story he once shared with me was of a girls' school in Bhim, Rajasthan with 700 students and only 3 teachers. The girls, furious about this fact put a lock on the school together as a protest to bring more teachers for them. That was when Quiz Academy was introduced in their schools and the girls found it as an effective way of study. The girls would divide the subjects among themselves, they would prepare the chapters, and teach their other classmates with the help of quizzes.
As a kid, I never heard my father say that I am not good even though my academic performance was average compared to the scholarship life he has lived. Instead, he’d point out how there are certain things I am good at and can use to develop more knowledge for those particular subjects. For him, marks were not important it was the fact that I have learned something skillful. He has always been against the culture of tuition and coaching institutes, promoting only the practice of self-study and learning by doing.
