Blog

About this blog

321articles covering the cognitive science behind quizzes, the practical work of building good ones, and the evolving landscape of AI in education. Most posts are 1,500-3,000 words and written for working educators, students preparing for high-stakes exams, and L&D professionals — not for SEO bots scraping a paragraph and moving on.

Editorial principles we try to keep:

• · Specific over generic. “Use spaced repetition” is generic; “here's how to schedule three review passes for an NCLEX cohort using the FSRS algorithm” is specific. We aim for the second.
• · Show your work. When we cite a study (Roediger & Karpicke 2006, Bjork & Bjork 2011, Cepeda 2008) we link the original paper, not a secondhand blog summary.
• · Honest about limits. Posts about AI quiz generation explicitly note where the technology still produces low-quality output and what to do about it.
• · Plain English. Cognitive-science jargon (encoding specificity, transfer-appropriate processing, retrieval-induced forgetting) gets translated. Then defined. Then used.
• · No filler. If a post is short, it's because the topic doesn't need more. We don't pad to hit a word count.

Where to start

New to quiz-based learning? Three posts to read in order:

1. 1. What is the testing effect? — the cognitive-science finding behind why quizzes outperform re-reading.
2. 2. Spaced repetition guide — how to time reviews so retention compounds.
3. 3. Active recall, explained — the technique most strong studiers use, even if they don't name it.

For teachers building question banks fast: start with how to write good multiple-choice questions, then how to write good distractors.

For instructional designers: Bloom's taxonomy + item discrimination + formative vs summative.

For exam preppers: search the index for your specific exam (NCLEX, MCAT, GRE, etc.) — we cover the most-searched ones in depth.

How posts get written

Every post has a named author with a profile page. Authors are real people on the SimpleQuizMaker team or invited contributors (researchers, working teachers, L&D leads). AI helps with drafting, but every post is reviewed and edited by a human before publishing. We don't auto-publish AI-generated content as filler.

Corrections and disagreements welcome — email hello@simplequizmaker.com with the post slug and what you'd change. We update posts in place when warranted and add a footer note when a change is non-trivial.

Updates

Best way to keep up: bookmark /blogand check monthly, or follow the project on the channels listed in the footer. An email digest is on the roadmap; if you'd like to be notified when it launches, email hello@simplequizmaker.com with subject “blog digest.”