How do you know if students have understood your lesson?

Exit tickets are an easy way to find out. Here we cover some of our favorite questions and introduce digital exit tickets.

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What are exit tickets?

Exit tickets help teachers check if students have understood the lesson or were left scratching their heads. They work in a few ways:

• Provide formative assessment data with regard to learner understanding
• Encourage student reflection, prompting them to reflect what they’ve learned and what they need further time on
• Remove the group factor - when students answer in class they are often impacted by others, and are hesitant say if they don’t understand a concept for fear of embarrassment
• Facilitate open communication about your teaching and the learning environment

Traditionally, exit tickets use a slip of paper. One piece of paper per student, for every class. If the thought of a decimated forest doesn't put you off, then perhaps the printing and cutting will.

Digital exit tickets are a great alternative to paper based exit tickets. Tools like Ziplet make it quick and easy to check in with students, add some variety to your exit tickets, and re-use questions in future classes. You can also store all the responses you receive for future review.

Ideally, the exit tickets take students less than 5 minutes to complete, with somewhere between 1-3 questions. Aim for a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions.

With paper exit tickets, teachers give each student a slip at the end of class. If using a tool like Ziplet, you can schedule questions ahead of time for students to receive at the end of the class or after school.

Here are some of our favorite questions to ask students at the end of class.

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Questions to understand content comprehension

The following questions address student understanding of the lesson content and encourage them to reflect on their learning.

1. How well do you do you feel you understood today’s lesson?
2. What was the most important thing you learned in today’s class and why is it important?
3. What are two ways you contributed in class today?
4. What is one thing you would like me to explain more clearly?
5. What is one thing you would like us to review again in the next lesson?
6. How could you apply what you learned today into real life?
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Questions to assess the learning environment

These questions address the broader approach to learning and might typically be used once per term to shift teaching approach per course or learning module.

1. What’s one change we could make to the way we learn in this class?
2. What’s one thing you’d like me to START doing in class?
3. What’s one thing you’d like me to STOP doing in class?
4. What’s one thing you’d like me to CONTINUE doing in class?
5. Did you value the group activity today? Do you think the activity or task would have been better done alone?
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Conclusion

Rather than relying on summative evaluation to gauge how the class is going, try introducing formative assessment as digital exit tickets to understand comprehension, validate learning strategies, and increase student-teacher communication.

Ziplet is a free app for students and teachers that makes it easy to collect student feedback. Join here and take a look at the question library to explore our suggested exit ticket questions.

You can also check out our full list of exit ticket ideas and examples.

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