Seven exam review games that need no equipment

The seven games in one table

Choose the game by what you are reviewing: facts and vocabulary, procedures with steps, or concepts students get wrong. All of them work with the desks where they are, and need only the board, students' notebooks and your sheet of questions.

Three rules that make a game review, not noise

The Association for Psychological Science, summarising the review by John Dunlosky and colleagues (January 2013), reports that practice testing and distributed practice received the highest overall utility rating among ten study techniques, while rereading, highlighting and summarisation received a low rating. Pooja Agarwal defines retrieval practice as a strategy in which bringing information to mind enhances learning. From that we take our three rules for a review game:

1. Every student recalls the answer, not just the one with a hand up. Everyone writes in their notebook or stands together, and then you choose who answers. In “Principles of Instruction” (American Educator, Spring 2012), Barak Rosenshine lists ways teachers involve all students in answering, including having every student write the answer on a card and hold it up.
2. Questions most of the class gets right. Rosenshine writes that the optimal success rate appears to be about 80 percent — it shows students are learning the material and are also challenged. He warns that if practice does not have a high success level, students may be practising and learning errors.
3. A short game every week, not one review lesson. Distributed practice is one of the two techniques rated highest. Rosenshine also writes that classes with weekly quizzes scored better on final exams than classes with only one or two quizzes during the term.

For facts and vocabulary

1. Two-minute brain dump — 10 minutes

1. Write a lesson or unit title on the board; every student writes everything they remember about it in two minutes, books closed.
2. Each student compares their list with their neighbour's and adds what they forgot in a different pen.
3. Go round the pairs: “one thing on your list nobody has said yet”. Each new correct item wins a point for the pair's desk line.

• Class of 40: every two neighbours are a pair — 20 pairs, and nobody stands up.
• Fits: facts, vocabulary and concepts: “everything you know about decimals”, “the parts of a cell”, “types of sentence”.
• The trap: students copying their neighbour's list instead of writing. The first two minutes alone are the game; the second pen shows the student what they forgot — and shows you too.

2. Hot seat — 10 minutes

1. One student sits on a chair at the front with their back to the board, and you write a term from the unit on the board behind them.
2. Their teammates give a definition or an example without saying the word or any part of it, until the student guesses it.
3. A guess within a minute wins the point; then a student from the other team takes the chair.

• Class of 40: two teams, half the room each. Teammates give clues in seat order, not whoever's hand goes up first.
• Fits: vocabulary and terms: “denominator”, “photosynthesis”, “subject of a sentence”.
• The trap: the same five students giving every clue. Seat order means every student needs to know the definition.

For procedures with steps

3. Row relay — 10 to 15 minutes

1. Each line of desks, front to back, gets one sheet with three multi-step problems.
2. Each student writes exactly one step — or corrects the step before if it is wrong — and passes the sheet back. When a problem is finished, the next student starts the next one.
3. The last student holds the sheet up. Points go to each correct problem, not only to the fastest line.

• Class of 40: four lines of ten desks, so four teams, and nobody leaves their seat.
• Fits: multi-step procedures: solving an equation, adding fractions with unlike denominators, parsing a sentence, balancing a chemical equation.
• The trap: the strongest student working the whole problem when the sheet arrives. “One step per student” is the game itself, and different handwriting on each line makes it easy to check.

4. Teacher vs class — 5 to 10 minutes

1. Write a fully worked answer on the board with numbered lines and exactly one mistake, and tell the class so.
2. Every student has 30 seconds to write the number of the wrong line and its correction in their notebook, in silence.
3. On your signal, everyone holds up their notebook at once: if more than half the class is right, the class gets the point; otherwise you do.

• Class of 40: everyone at their desk, a notebook the only equipment, and you see 40 answers at a glance.
• Fits: procedures and their common mistakes — for example adding numerators and denominators to write $\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{3}=\frac{2}{5}$ instead of $\frac{5}{6}$.
• The trap: a mistake nobody actually makes. Use one you have seen in your students' notebooks this term; that is the one you want them to catch before the exam.

For concepts and misconceptions

5. Stand if it's true — 5 to 10 minutes

1. Read out a statement about the lesson, true or false.
2. Students think for five seconds in silence; on your signal, everyone who thinks it is true stands at the same moment, and everyone else stays seated.
3. Pick one student standing and one sitting to give their reason in a sentence, then give the answer.

• Class of 40: everyone at their desk, no teams, no points, and you see the whole room's answer in a second.
• Fits: common misconceptions, read as statements for students to judge, such as “a fraction with a bigger denominator is always bigger” (false) or “green plants make their own food” (true).
• The trap: students looking around before they decide. One signal for everyone is the condition of the game: Rosenshine writes of choral responses that all students needed to start together, on a signal, and that when they did not, only the faster students answered.

6. Numbered heads — 10 to 15 minutes

1. Every four students are a group: the front pair turns to face the pair behind, and each takes a number from 1 to 4.
2. Ask a question. Each group has a minute to agree on the answer and make sure everyone in it can explain it.
3. Call a number: that student in every group writes the group's answer in their notebook and holds it up. Each correct answer wins a point.

• Class of 40: ten groups of four, by turning round, not moving desks.
• Fits: concepts that need explaining, and procedures worth agreeing on: “why…?”, “what is the next step in…?”.
• The trap: the strongest student answering for the group every time. Calling the number after the discussion, not before, makes everyone in the group responsible for understanding.

For the whole unit

7. Points board — 20 minutes

1. Draw a grid on the board: four columns for four lessons in the unit, and three rows worth 1, 2 and 3 points by difficulty.
2. The team whose turn it is picks a square; you read its question from your sheet, and every student in every team writes an answer in their notebook within a minute.
3. Call a number from 1 to 10: the student in that seat of the team whose turn it is reads their answer. Right, and the team wins the square's points; wrong, and the first other team to answer correctly gets one point. Then cross the square out.

• Class of 40: four teams by desk lines, as in the row relay, each student numbered 1 to 10 by seat in their line. You need 12 questions written on your sheet before the lesson.
• Fits: the whole unit — facts in the 1-point row, procedures in the 2-point row, concepts in the 3-point row.
• The trap: the other teams sitting idle while they wait. Everyone writes every answer, and the bonus point goes to whoever had it right when the team on turn did not.

When review games will not help

• When the lesson was never understood. A game brings back what a student learned; it does not teach what they did not. Our advice: if more than half the class gets two questions in a row wrong, stop the game and reteach.
• When losers are knocked out. Games where a wrong answer means sitting out remove the students who most need the practice. That is why none of these seven knocks anyone out.
• When points become marks. Agarwal writes that retrieval practice is a learning strategy, not an assessment strategy. Our advice is to keep game points out of the gradebook: a student afraid of being wrong in a game may stop trying.
• When all the review is in the last lesson. Spread the games over the last two weeks, one short game a lesson. Two review lessons before the end-of-term exam has a ready plan for the last two lessons.

In maths, some of these games also work in the middle of a lesson, not only at review time — see active learning in the maths lesson. And when review is over and only the exam is left, check the paper before printing with twelve checks.

Written with String's editorial team: we use AI for research and first drafts, and a person checks every fact and every source before anything is published. How we write