Using Jigsaw Activites for Test Review in the Secondary Classroom

Test time. Students hate it and always have a terrible time studying. Review in class is usually limited to study guides where the teacher goes over the answers and the students just struggle to write fast enough to copy everything to the t instead of looking up the information, or review games like jeopardy or charades. These are some great review tools, however, sometimes a little variety can help a lot.

As and English teacher, I found that students were not keeping up with reading or not understanding everything. The usual study guides helped, but when quizzes came around, I found that they were lacking, as students weren't studying. I decided to try something a little new. As a student in college, I learned about jigsaws as a possible activity. This is a technique where the students are broken into a group and are put in charge of a certain portion of a text or a certain article. The group is then split up and new groups are formed with one member from each of the former groups. Each person in the newly formed groups are now supposed to educate their new group-mates about what their group read. This allows a teacher to cover more territory in a shorter time because students are required to read only one article, instead of four or five. This is a great reading technique to use for comprehension. I decided to use is as a review.

My class was reading the book Night, and was full of reluctant readers. I placed each student in a group of 4-5 and gave them a worksheet and a section of the chapter to re-read and answer the questions. At the bottom of their worksheet was a table with the page number assignments. I then had the students break up into new groups and share what they found. This allowed students to copy notes down and use the sheet as a study guide. Now, I have a class that doesn't like to do the work, so, for those that actually copied the information from the other groups, I allowed them to use the sheet on the test. You could also do this by having group presentations, where each group presents the information to the rest of the class, allowing them more of an overt teaching role.

After my students participated in this activity, I found that their quiz scores went up dramatically from previous quizzes. They knew more about that section of the book and were able to discuss it better. Using some variety in the review process will help student gain a better understanding of your content and also help them become more interested. So, why not try it out?