When you teach students new material, it’s often helpful to gauge their familiarity with any new concepts or terms you’re about to introduce. One quick and easy way to accomplish this is the Plus – Minus – Question Mark (PMQM) technique. This Classroom Assessment Technique (CAT) can help you prepare for instruction by showing you where you should focus your time to help students learn unfamiliar terms that may be critical to their comprehension of future course content.

To use the PMQM technique, prepare a list of core facts, terms, or concepts that students will eventually be expected to thoroughly understand in your course. Ask students to indicate their familiarity with each term by responding to each with a plus sign (+) if they are familiar with the term, a minus sign (-) if they’re unfamiliar with it, or a question mark (?) if they’re not sure. To collect students’ responses, you can use online polling software such as TopHat, free online polling tools such as Mentimeter or Poll Everywhere, or even a paper and pencil. Using an online application can facilitate tabulating and summarizing the results, which you can then share with your students. Sharing the results with students can reassure them that they aren’t alone in being unfamiliar with some of the terms on the list, and this provides you with an opportunity to bolster your students’ growth mindset: You can point out that while they may not know all the terms yet, they’ll be thoroughly familiar with all of them by the end of the course.

It’s important to keep in mind that this technique asks students to self-assess their familiarity with terms or concepts; it does not provide proof that students already have a solid knowledge or understanding of the terms. But that feedback, while limited, can be enough to identify useful starting points for further instruction.

The Plus – Minus – Question Mark technique is a useful tool to add to your teaching toolbox; it’s easy to prepare and carry out, it won’t take up much class time, and it can provide useful information about students’ level of familiarity with key course concepts.

To learn more about this Classroom Assessment Technique, see the new edition of Angelo’s Classroom Assessment Techniques, which is available in both print and e-book editions. If you’d like to discuss other ways of gauging your students’ familiarity with course content, consider scheduling a consultation with a CITL consultant.

Work Cited

Angelo, T.A. with Zakrajsek, T.D. (2024). Classroom assessment techniques: Formative feedback tools for college and university teachers. Jossey-Bass.