Tweaking a Competitive Review Game to Include All Students 

In this thoughtful article in AMLE Magazine, Melissa Marks (University of Pittsburgh/ Greensburg) describes how much her students enjoyed playing competitive review games when she was a middle-school teacher. But one year, an eighth-grade girl refused to take part in the games, and after class broke down in tears and told Marks that other students called her “stupid” and taunted her when she didn’t get points for her team (“That was so easy”). Other teachers suggested putting an end to competitive games or having the girl serve as a helper, but Marks hit upon a different solution: allowing groups of students to work together, thus removing the pressure to answer individually. With student input, she shaped a new review game that was dubbed The Betting Game by students. Here’s how it works.

• Students sit in mixed groups of 3-5.
• Each group gets $100 in play money (or 100 points) to bet with.
• Group members must agree on the amount of each bet (whole numbers only), otherwise the group forfeits the round.
• The teacher writes several answers on the board, each one corresponding to a physical motion – for example, in a social studies class: 

• Raise one hand – Freedom of speech
• Raise two hands – No unreasonable search and seizure
• Raise one foot – Freedom of the press
• Raise two feet – Right to a speedy and public trial 
• Stand up – End of involuntary servitude

• The teacher asks the class, “Which of these is not part of the Bill of Rights?”
• Students discuss within their group, taking as long as necessary to reach agreement.
• When the teacher says, “Go!” students all perform the motion corresponding to their answer choice.
• Groups that answer correctly add their wager to their score; those that answer incorrectly have their wager deducted.
• If any student makes a movement that differs from the rest of the group, the whole group is docked the amount of their wager.
• If some groups start falling way behind, the teacher might decide to have a bonus round with a different type of question – for example, students write as many parts of speech as they can within one minute and get five points for each correct answer. This rapidly racks up points and makes the game more evenly matched.

Marks says the Betting Game has been successful all the way from third grade to university classes because it encourages cooperation and peer learning, brings together diverse groups of students (she regularly rotates the groups), involves physical movement, and allows review of important material in a fun context. The eighth-grade girl who was so reluctant to play the previous type of competitive review game liked this format much better, saying that other students did a much better job explaining things than Marx did. “To me, this was as good as it gets,” says Marx.

“All Bets On: A Cooperative Review Game” by Melissa Marks in AMLE Magazine, January 2014 (Vol. 1, #5, p. 18-20), www.amle.org; Marks can be reached at mjm37@pitt.edu.

From the Marshall Memo #522