Exit Tickets That Serve Different Purposes

Exit tickets are simple diagnostic assessments given to students at the end of a class. The “ticket” in the name refers to the fact that students originally needed to pass the assessment to get permission to leave, but now they are generally for instructors to determine which topics they need to return to in the next class. Plus, students can use them to determine where they have gaps in their understanding, and by drawing up new information a second time, these tickets also harden the knowledge in students’ minds to improve retention. Instructors can collect exit tickets digitally using Quizizz, Kahoot!, Mentimeter, and other apps. There are a variety of exit ticket formats that serve different purposes. Here are a few. What stuck with you today? The basic exit ticket asks students to summarize what they just learned. When students take notes during class, they often focus on capturing bits of information rather than overall themes or concepts. Asking students to summarize what they just learned allows them to synthesize the information to identify the underlying connections among different sets of facts. The mind is also better at retaining information with significance than it is brute facts, and couching the information within broader concepts makes simple facts easier to retrieve. One option is to ask students to list the main points of the day’s lesson. But a useful twist is to also ask, “What stuck with you today?” This question gauges which material captured students’ attention, which is crucial to understanding and retention. If students do not list concepts that the instructor believes are critical to the class, the instructor could revise how they present those concepts—for example, by using new examples, analogies, or metaphors. Instructors might even find it interesting to ask half the class the first question and the other half the second and compare the responses. How confident are you in your learning? While a one-sentence summary can tell instructors whether students can pick out the main themes in a class, it does not show how well students understood those themes. Asking students for a detailed discussion of the themes is time-consuming, so an alternative is to ask students how confident they are in their learning. Some people use a traffic light analogy, where students rank their understanding of concepts from red (little understanding) to green (a high level of understanding). It might seem like instructors would want all students to answer “green” on a concept, but another approach is to expect most students to answer “yellow” because they have just been introduced to the concept. The instructor can ask students to re-rate the concept after a week of readings and application to determine how many went from red or yellow to green. Instructors who do not see movement up the light scale have reason to revise the work that students do outside of class. Self-test Instructors can probe student understanding at greater depth with a quick self-test using one of the aforementioned audience response systems. Students can answer 10 multiple-choice questions in five minutes, and the system will tabulate the results to inform the next lesson. Those teaching quantitative topics like math might give students a simple problem that they can complete quickly. One decision instructors need to make is whether to ask simple fact-retrieval questions or application questions. Most commentators prefer application questions as a better measure of how well students understand the material, but these questions can be difficult for students to answer immediately on the heels of receiving the material. Application questions might be better for after students have had time to digest the information, and noteworthy educators like those who built the famous Learning How to Learn course prefer to use simple factual retrieval questions in their lessons. What questions do you have? When instructors in face-to-face classes ask students whether they have questions at the end of a lesson, students often keep quiet lest they look dumb in front of their peers. That’s why anonymous audience response systems are so handy. The responses might show where an instructor inadvertently left out important information or did not convey information as well as they thought they did. Some questions might even build on the material in ways that give the instructor ideas for further developing the concepts in future classes. Exit ticket journal Exit tickets need not end up only in the instructor’s hands; students can also preserve their tickets in a journal, which they can use to reflect on and observe the growth in their learning. When an instructor returns to a topic because students showed that they struggled with it in their exit tickets, students can add the new information in their journal as a response to their ticket, giving the information more context. A doctor once told me that when it’s unclear whether a patient understands their condition or treatment, he does not describe it to them, as the patient could nod in agreement without any understanding. Rather, he asks them to describe their condition or treatment to him. Exit tickets are a simple way for instructors to do something similar to monitor student understanding and address gaps that could undermine subsequent learning.