Turn Any Lesson into Quiz Questions in 10 Minutes

Minutes 1–2: find the key ideas

Look at the lesson plan and ask: if students remember only three or four things from this lesson, what should they be? Write each one as a plain sentence. Everything else in the lesson, the examples, the practice, the detail, exists to support those sentences.

These four sentences are the skeleton of the quiz. Notice the last one: it is there because of a mistake students commonly make, which we will come back to.

Minutes 3–6: one question per idea

Write one question for each key idea, and aim for questions a student can only answer if they understood it, not just read it. The easiest way is to change the question stem.

Questions that begin “What is the name of…” test memory. They have their place, but a quiz made only of names tells you who memorised the page, not who understood it.

Minutes 7–8: wrong answers from real mistakes

This is the step that turns a quiz into a diagnostic tool. For each question, ask what a student who misunderstood would answer, and make that one of the options. For “Why are summer days warmer?”, the obvious wrong answer is “because the Earth is closer to the Sun”. Astronomy education research has found that explanation again and again, in children and adults alike; Anthony Lelliott and Marissa Rollnick’s review of more than thirty years of studies counts it among the common alternative ideas about the seasons.

So it goes on the screen, alongside two other plausible ideas, and the reveal shows you how many of your students hold it. In this class it was half of them.

A wrong answer nobody would pick shows you nothing. If you cannot think of a real mistake for a question, a true-or-false statement may be the better format for it.

Minutes 9–10: a slide and some explanations

Two small additions make the quiz teach as well as test. First, a title slide at the start that names the topic, so the game opens with a frame rather than a cold question. Keep it neutral: a slide that gives away the answers turns the quiz into a reading test.

Second, one or two sentences of explanation for each question, which appear at the reveal on the big screen and under each student’s own result. Write the explanation so it speaks to the wrong answer you expect. For the seasons question: “It is the tilt. In summer our half of the Earth leans towards the Sun, so sunlight arrives more directly and for longer. The Earth is in fact closest to the Sun in early January.”

That last sentence does a lot of work. Students who believed the distance idea now have a fact that contradicts it, and it is a fact surprising enough to remember.

Don’t start from nothing

You do not need to write every question yourself. In the Giga Quizzes editor, + Add question offers two shortcuts under the grid of question types. From my bank lists the questions in all your other sets, so a good one from last year’s quiz can be reused. From Discover searches public quizzes and copies the questions you tick into your set, where you can edit them.

Borrowing two or three and writing the rest is often the quickest route to a quiz that fits your lesson exactly. The borrowed ones still need the step above, though: check that their wrong answers are mistakes your students would make.

The finished quiz

Ten minutes later, the seasons lesson has a quiz: one title slide, four questions built on the four key ideas, each with a wrong answer taken from a real misconception, and an explanation at every reveal. Run it at the end of the lesson or the start of the next. Whatever the class gets wrong is where the next lesson begins.

If this is your first quiz, the guide to creating your first quiz goes from an empty library to a live game step by step.