After a couple of days of logical fallacy station activities, we review before the quiz. How long you spend depends on how your students are doing and how much review time you want to give them. My unit covers 12 fallacies, and that’s a lot of terminology.
A self-check practice quiz
First, I post a self-check practice quiz. A practice quiz goes a long way in helping students prepare. If you want to make one that students can retake as many times as they like in Google Forms, here are the settings I use:
- Release grades immediately after each submission
- Let students see missed questions, but not the correct answers
- Leave point values on
- Under the settings for how responses are collected, turn off “Limit to 1 response”
Assign it through Google Classroom, and students can retake it as many times as they want. Whether you take a grade on it is your choice. I don’t. It shows students where their grade would be, and I tell them to take it, review their notes, and take it again until they get 100 percent. I give them a class day to work on that.
Going back over the stations
We also go through the station handouts together. We look at the commercials again (they’re short, but you don’t need to rewatch them all) and talk about which fallacy each one uses and why. We always go over the practice quiz station with its four statements. If we have time, students perform skits while the audience guesses which fallacy they’re using. Students enjoy watching each other be silly. I also put up a gallery wall of their fallacy posters.
That’s usually enough. After that, it’s on students to commit the fallacies to memory. It’s a classic case of “you study, you do well on the test.” If you want to make accommodations, or you aren’t weighting this heavily in your grade book, you could make the quiz open note or add a word bank of fallacies. The quiz looks just like the practice quiz with different questions, and two versions are included in the unit folder.