What a Check Question Should Do
A check question is not a quiz item. Its job is to reveal whether you can produce an explanation, not whether you can recognise a fact you have just read. Most check questions in study guides fail that test because they can be answered from the surrounding section.
The Study Guide Builder attaches a check question to each section. This article covers what makes one useful and how to fix the ones that are not.
Quick answer
A check question should be answerable only from understanding, and answering it should take a sentence or more. It should not be answerable by finding a matching phrase in the section it sits beside. Good ones ask for a reason, a comparison, a consequence, or a definition in your own words. If you can answer it by rereading the section, it is checking your reading, not your knowledge.
The proximity problem
A question placed directly under the section that answers it invites you to read upward. That tests comprehension of the paragraph, which is useful once and useless afterwards. For revision, the question has to work with the section covered.
The practical fix is to collect all the check questions onto a separate page and answer them in one session with the guide closed. Then the questions become a test of the topic rather than of the page.
Four shapes that work
- Why: “Why does this step come before the next one?” requires the reasoning, not the order.
- Compare: “How does this differ from the alternative, and what follows from the difference?”
- Consequence: “If this condition did not hold, what would change?”
- Own words: “Explain this without using the term itself.”
Each of these resists recognition. You cannot answer any of them by having seen the wording before, which is exactly the property that makes them useful.
Signs a question is too easy
If the answer is a word or a number, the question is probably recall rather than understanding, which is fine as a first pass but not as the only check. If the answer appears verbatim in the section, the question is a lookup. If you can answer it in under five seconds, it did not require retrieval from memory.
Too hard is also a problem. A question requiring knowledge the section never covered will always fail, and a permanent failure in the set teaches you nothing about the topic. Delete it.
Answering properly
Answer aloud or in writing, not in your head. Silent answering allows a vague sense of knowing to pass for an answer, because nothing is produced that could be wrong. Writing forces the formulation, and formulation is what an exam marks.
When you check, mark an answer wrong if you needed the source to produce it, even if it feels familiar. Then rewrite the question if it was badly built, or revisit the section if the question was fair.
For the wider method, see How to Turn a Passage into Guide Sections You Can Revise From. For the check that should come first, see How to Check a Generated Study Guide Before You Trust It.
Collect the questions from Study Guide Builder onto one page and answer them with the guide closed before you count a topic as revised.
Common questions
Why are check questions often too easy?
They sit directly under the section that answers them, so you read upward instead of recalling. Collect all the questions onto one page and answer them with the guide closed, and they become a test of the topic rather than of the page.
What makes a check question too hard?
It requires knowledge the section never covered, so it always fails. A permanent failure teaches you nothing about the topic and makes the rest of the results harder to interpret. Delete it rather than keeping it in the set.
Should I answer check questions in my head?
No. Silent answering lets a vague sense of knowing pass for an answer, because nothing is produced that could be wrong. Answer aloud or in writing, since formulation is what an exam actually marks.