An exit ticket is a short task which shows how well all students have understood the lesson’s key ideas.  Exit tickets are simple but powerful: designing and using them can help us refine our planning, find out what students have understood and teach more responsively.  The first half of this post revisits these critical aspects of exit tickets; the second half shares two new ideas, discussing the exit ticket as an ‘encapsulating task’ for the lesson, and the effect exit tickets can have on student retention.

1) Exit tickets improve planning

An exit ticket provides a focus for the lesson: this helps us plan better.  Writing an exit ticket can help us to clarify our objectives: if it’s proving hard to formulate a good question, this may show that our objectives are:

  • Too nebulous (if we want students to ‘understand the causes of the First World War’ or ‘appreciate the impact of logging on the Amazon’)
  • Too numerous (if we are hoping students will understand Act I, Scene 3, write a character sketch and practise their public speaking delivering it to the class)
  • Too ambitious (if students are to be able to ‘convert fractions, decimals and percentages’ in a lesson)

Designing an exit ticket may lead us to revise and narrow our objectives.

Moreover, identifying what students should be able to do at the end of the lesson clarifies what needs to happen during it.  Exit tickets encourage us to select activities based on their contribution to the lesson’s objectives (over how engaging or enjoyable they may be).  Exit tickets help us see whether we’ve included everything that matters; they may also help us to cut activities which don’t contribute to the objectives.

2) Exit tickets show how effective the lesson was

Exit tickets offer an objective measure of the lesson’s success.  We need one, because usually we are disposed to view our efforts favourably and overestimate how well things have gone.  Objective data overcomes this by showing unambiguously how much each student has learned.  So a good exit ticket must:

  • Focus on the lesson’s crucial idea(s)
  • Show individual students’ understanding and misconceptions
  • Provide usable information based on rapid student answers

Three possible examples:

‘Romeo is rash’.  Identify three quotations supporting this point.  How well do students know the scene?  How well can they select evidence?

A solid metal object sinks: is this because of its weight?  Do students know, and can they explain, the difference between mass and density?

Complete each sentence with the correct article:
J’aime bien __ foot.
Je voudrais __ stylo.
Je visite __ montagnes.
Je mange __ pomme.

3) Exit tickets allow responsive teaching

Exit tickets allow us to respond to gaps in students’ knowledge and understanding in the next lesson.  We can do this by:

  • Dividing – splitting exit tickets into three piles, yes/no/maybe
  • Digging – examining the ‘no’ and ‘maybe’ pile for patterns
  • Deciding – to review key ideas, target misconceptions, offer more practice or splitting students into groups

We could mark them, but this isn’t essential: the whole process (dig, divide, decide) can’t take more than fifteen minutes if we are to do it every lesson, so whole-class feedback and alternatives to marking may be better.  Whatever our decision, we can encourage students to see it as an essential opportunity, not a punishment (more on this in a post on framing learning).

The preceding ideas will be familiar if you’ve read Responsive Teaching; the two most important things I’ve learned since the book was published are :

1) Exit tickets are tasks which encapsulate the lesson’s purpose

I almost wish I’d called exit tickets ‘encapsulating tasks’.  ‘Exit ticket’ is immediately recognisable, but ‘ticket’ sounds like a discrete task which must be marked and may not fit art, PE or drama.  I wrote in Responsive Teaching that we might use a question we’ve already planned in the lesson, might have them answer in their exercise books, and could us a practical activity.  The idea of an ‘encapsulating task’ reflects this: what matters is that the task offers an objective assessment which encapsulates the lesson’s purpose.  Steve Smith’s post about responsive teaching in language lessons reflects this and offers many ideas for tasks, such as choral repetition, which are not ‘exit tickets’ but are ‘encapsulating tasks’ and encourage responsive teaching.  We might better ask ‘What task encapsulates the lesson?’ than ‘What is the exit ticket?’

2) Exit tickets improve retention

I can now make slightly bolder claims about the relationship between exit tickets and learning.  In Responsive Teaching, I emphasised how separate these were, noting that exit tickets reflect what students understood in the moment – “temporary fluctuations in performance” – and offer little indication of what they will remember (p.61).  Recently, I came across a study which links exit tickets with longer-term retention.  Lyle and Crawford (2011) evaluated the effect of asking students 2-6 questions at the end of each 75-minute lecture.  The questions were simple – often with one-word answers – and focused on the lecture’s key ideas; students were given the correct answers as a group at the start of the next lecture (but not individual feedback).  Students scored better in their exams, liked exit tickets and found they highlighted what mattered most in the lecture.  This study shows that the testing effect works even when the test is immediately after study, so exit tickets both show performance and improve learning.

Conclusion

  • An encapsulating task offers an objective measure of students’ success, which provides a focus for planning, assessment and responsiveness.
  • Focusing on encapsulating tasks – rather than exit tickets – offers a tool which applies whatever and whoever we teach.
  • Encapsulating tasks both show current understanding and promote future retention.
  • Formulating, using and responding to encapsulating tasks is responsive teaching at its simplest and its most powerful.

This post is one of a series of updates to Responsive Teaching, marking a year since it’s publication. 

If you found this useful, you may appreciate

The more detailed discussion and exemplification of exit tickets in Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice, alongside discussion of five other endemic problems in teaching.

A previous, more detailed post on exit tickets.

A discussion of alternatives to individual feedback and marking.

References

Lyle, K. and Crawford, N. (2011). Retrieving Essential Material at the End of Lectures Improves Performance on Statistics Exams. Teaching of Psychology, 38(2), pp.94-97.