Create practice questions: a worksheet for parents

Why questions beat rereading

Twenty minutes, with the notes in front of you

Rereading feels like studying

Reading a page again is comfortable, and it makes the material feel familiar, which is easy to mistake for knowing it. Being asked a question is uncomfortable, and the discomfort is the part that works: pulling something out of memory is what makes it easier to pull out next time.

You do not need to know the subject to write good questions about it. You need the page of notes and a bit of stubbornness. Everything below is done from the notes — nothing here asks a tool for anything.

Four kinds of question

Write one of each

Four questions from one page of notes. Write them all before you ask any of them, and put the answers somewhere your child cannot see.

Spot the weak question

Five questions written from the same page

Here is a set a parent wrote in a hurry, from a page of notes on the Roman army. Three of them will not tell you anything useful. Tap the ones you would rewrite.

1. Roughly how many soldiers were in a legion?
3. Why did the Romans build roads between forts rather than around them?

What to take away

Three things to keep

If a wrong answer is not possible, it is not a check. That single test catches most weak questions.
One question at a time, and one answer at a time. Stacked questions hide exactly the gap you were looking for.
Let them mark you. Say something slightly wrong on purpose and let your child catch it — same material, much better evening.