Exit ticket generator

How to use the generator

1. Type the lesson title, and the topic in a few words. The topic fills in prompts like “Explain … in one sentence”.
2. Pick one to three prompts. They appear in the order you pick them; you can add one of your own.
3. Choose how learners answer each one: lines to write on, Yes / Not yet, or five labelled faces.
4. In the last five minutes, project it, or hand out the printed slips (four to an A4 page, with lines to cut along).
5. Read the answers before the next lesson, and start that lesson with what they tell you.

What an exit ticket is

An exit ticket is a short question or two that learners answer before they leave. It isn’t a test and it isn’t graded. It’s for you: a quick reading of where the group is, taken while the lesson is still fresh, so you can decide how to start the next one.

Two classic versions are in the bank. The muddiest point comes from Frederick Mosteller, a statistics professor at Harvard, who ended his lectures by asking students what had been least clear (Mosteller 1989). The minute paper asks for the most important thing learned and the question that remains; it’s one of the classroom assessment techniques collected by Angelo and Cross (1993).

Which prompt for which purpose

Ask about performance rather than feelings. “Could you explain this lesson to someone else?” is a better question than “Was this clear?”. A smooth, fluent lesson makes people feel they learned more without making them learn more (Carpenter 2013), and people’s ratings of their own understanding track their real understanding only loosely (Dunlosky & Lipko 2007).

Why the end of the lesson works

Timing matters as much as wording. Research on interruptions found that people mind being asked something far less at the boundary between tasks than in the middle of one (Adamczyk & Bailey 2004). The end of a lesson is the clearest boundary there is: the work is done and nothing is lost by stopping.

It’s also a moment to practise. Trying to recall what you’ve just learned helps you remember it later, more than reading it again (Roediger & Karpicke 2006), so an “Explain it in one sentence” or “Apply it” prompt does some teaching as well as checking. Keep it short: in surveys, a longer announced length means fewer people start, and the answers near the end get shorter (Galesic & Bosnjak 2009). That’s why the generator stops at three.

Use the answers the next day

1. Sort, don’t read twice. Make three piles (got it, partly, not yet) or group the muddy points by theme. Five minutes is usually enough.
2. Start with the biggest pile. Explain it a different way, with a new example, rather than repeating yesterday’s.
3. Tell learners what changed. “Seven of you said where range() stops was confusing, so we start there.” The muddiest point works when the instructor answers back, and learners are less willing to give feedback they don’t expect to be used (Chen & Hoshower 2003).
4. Ask again a day later. People judge how well they’ve learned something more accurately after a delay than straight away (Rhodes & Tauber 2011), so the same question at the start of the next lesson is worth asking too.

A worked example

A bootcamp’s fourth Python lesson covers for loops and range(). The exit ticket has three prompts: “Could you explain this lesson to someone else?” (Yes / Not yet), “Write one line of code that uses a for loop with range()”, and “What was the most confusing part of today?”. Say 18 learners hand in slips:

• 12 say Yes, 6 say Not yet.
• 10 write a working loop; 5 write range(1, 3) expecting 1, 2, 3; 3 leave it blank.
• For the muddiest point, 7 mention where range() stops, 3 mention indentation, the rest vary.

The code lines and the muddy points agree, which makes the decision easy: open the next lesson with five minutes on the stop value, with two fresh examples, and say why you’re doing it. Then check it worked with one question whose wrong answers each reveal a misconception; the multiple-choice question checker helps you write it. And read “12 of 18” with care: with a group this size the honest range is wide, as the training feedback calculator shows.