Why Can't the Weekly Quiz Help All Students?

Since I set foot in the classroom in 2009, the sixth grade math department has developed a weekly quiz. The process has been altered here and there, but generally students are given seven days (Friday to Friday) to complete twenty problems or an open response that is a review of something we have already done in class. And when you continue to do something for eight years in the classroom, it should produce a good return on investment. The math teachers are confident that that is the case, but I wonder to what extent. The best explanation I got was from a teacher who went to work in a separate school district.

That teacher went on to implement the weekly quiz in her seventh grade classroom, but the two other math teachers on the team were not ready to take the plunge. As a result, it became a pretty good accidental experiment to measure the impact of the weekly quiz. What she concluded when the year was over was that there were virtually no changes in the MCAS scores of the students that were in the warning and needs improvement categories in comparison to the two other teachers (the control group), but she had a much greater percentage of students score advanced than the other two teachers. As I said, it was a pretty good accidental experiment. Perhaps this teacher had other practices that were unique that enabled her advanced students to reach a higher level or perhaps the sample of students was disproportionate in how they were distributed to the three teachers. For the sake of what I'm writing, I'm going to accept that the findings between weekly quiz implementation and MCAS results of this accident experiment. The question for me then became, why are the lower achieving students not making bigger gains with a quiz that is designed to reenforce the skills that they may have missed the first time around? 

1. Executive Functioning. Giving the students seven days (or five after the students do nothing over the weekend) to complete twenty problems actually creates more of a problem for many students. It gives them seven days to lose the physical paper and procrastinate with the assignment. In eight years, you pick up on this pretty quickly, so I take a million precautions which include putting it online, sending emails to parents, making the "rough draft" due on Tuesday or Wednesday, a spot in the back of the room with extra blank weekly quizzes, forcing students to come at lunch, and ordering a team of fairies to move the students hands in a certain sequence to put correct answers on a paper. Despite all of these measures, I routinely had students fail to turn in the assignment when it was due on Friday. At one point or another 41% of my students did not turn in a weekly quiz. And among that group 73% had a weekly quiz in the needs improvement or warning category for fifth grade MCAS. Taking this further, for students that do the work then lose the work, and do the work again, they are missing out on feedback that other students are getting. 
2. Time and feedback. Students can pass in the weekly quiz at the start of class any day of the week and get feedback before it is ultimately due on Friday. Many students take advantage, so my method for giving feedback is the red pen and the highlighter. If it's wrong, I highlight the problem, and if it's correct I give a red check. The trouble comes for lower students when they see the highlight. It's wrong, but where do you go from here? Time is a precious resource for me. I do not have the time to write on every paper "to carry out the distributive property multiply every term in the parenthesis by what is outside the parentheses. A term is anything separated by a plus or minus sign. Once the terms are multiplied do not combine terms that do not have the same variable because that would be like saying you bought two bags of popcorn and a new car and the price for all of them is the same." Whereas with the higher achieving students, I can highlight and they can often self-correct or at least know where in their notes, family, or online they can go to get the feedback they need.
3. Copying. Once I put the red pen indicating a correct answer on one paper, that answer can become viral. As long as I see the work, I'm not going to interrogate everyone I see. Each of the past eight years, I have caught people cheating. There's a fine line between students helping each other (which I discourage with weekly quizzes unless it's in my presence) and students copying. Typically the ones that copy will admit it because when I ask them to explain they can't. For students that struggle, this of course represents an easy way out. 
4. Basic Skills. Some of the weekly quizzes involve problems with multiple steps and big numbers. For the students that still cannot multiply with two digit numbers this represents a mountain-sized obstacle. I do not want students to spending more than thirty minutes with the weekly quiz. Without basic skills though, it's impossible not to. 
5. Reviewing Tests and Quizzes. Many of the weekly quiz questions are taken directly from quizzes and tests we take in class. We usually go after the questions that were hardest. Consequently, if students would absorb my explanations after tests and quizzes perfectly they would never have an issue. The opposite seems to be true though, which causes me to wonder if reviewing tests and quizzes serves as any purpose for these students. 
6. Grit and effort. Handing in a weekly quiz is not difficult when all the accommodations are taken into account. Yet it still isn't done one hundred percent of the time. 

There are surely other factors such as home life, IQ, or sleep but these are outside of my control. Looking at these six problems, part of the solution seems to scream for differentiation and motivation. Easier said than done, but that's what I will look to follow up on.