Are you wondering how to make a personality quiz for your learners? This blog post walks you through every step of creating a personality quiz that will be fit for purpose and not cost a thing.
Why make and use a personality quiz in the classroom?
With a personality quiz, you’ll be able to create
- a meaningful/learning-rich activity – select the level of vocabulary and grammar appropriate for your learners with a focus on a particular topic/skills;
- a personalised activity – learners use the language in the context of their own lives; and
- a highly engaging activity – a personality quiz will most certainly add a fun element to the lesson. After all, who doesn’t want to find out whether they are ‘an awesome person or not’?
A personality quiz can help hold learners’ attention for a longer span of time, making it more likely for them to stay engaged and actively participate in other activities that follow after the quiz.
In addition, personality quizzes can help you get to know your learners and their interests on a deeper level.
How to make a personality quiz
There are two options: you can either opt for a paper-based quiz or a digital quiz.
The first several steps are quite similar for both options.
STEP 1 – Decide on the topic (what your quiz will actually be about and what you want your learners to find out) and language you’d like to incorporate
- Are you an ________ or an ________ ?
- What kind/type of ________ are you?
- What is your ________ ?
For example: Are you an Espresso or a Cappuccino?
STEP 2 – Define personality types
At the end of your quiz, the quiz scores/results will show which personality type your learners fit into. For paper-based quizzes (or quizzes in other formats when learners need to record and tally the score manually), it is a good idea to limit the results to two or three types only to make the quiz logic and tallying up the scores as simple as possible.
For example: I’ve chosen two personality types for this quiz:
- Espresso
- Cappuccino
If you’re an Espresso,
You are hardworking, confident and organised. You know what you want, how to get there, and nothing deters you from that path.
If you’re a Cappuccino,
You prefer change as monotony bores you. You are always on the lookout for an adventure.
STEP 3 – Write questions
For example: I’ve planned to practise expressing preferences so the quiz will include ‘would you rather’ questions:
- Would you rather be able to teleport or read minds?
- Would you rather have a tiger-sized hamster or a hamster-sized tiger?
- Would you rather find true love today or win the lottery next year?
- Would you rather be the worst player on a team that always wins or the best player on a team that always loses?
- Would you rather be able to create a new holiday or a new language?
- Would you rather jump into a pool of chocolate pudding or a pool of strawberry ice cream?
- Would you rather be liked by everyone you’ve ever met or have everything you’ve ever wanted?
*See more ‘would you rather’ questions here.
Each question will have 2 answer options.
Now correlate every answer to every personality.
A paper-based quiz
One big disadvantage of paper-based personality quizzes in the classroom is that tallying each individual score may take more time than actually doing the quiz itself.
The best way to overcome it is to assign the same letter/number to the options associated with a particular personality so that learners could find out their personality type by getting ‘mostly As’ (Personality Type 1), ‘mostly Bs’ (Personality Type 2) or ‘mostly Cs’ (Personality Type 3) results.
A digital quiz
Making a digital quiz will not take much of your time. Here I will show how you can easily make it for your learners on your own website for free and without using any third party platforms. If you don’t have your own website and would like to create one, read the post HOW TO CREATE A TEACHER WEBSITE IN 3 STEPS without coding and completely free or for very little money (a self-hosted website will now cost about $36 per year or less if you get a hosting package for several years).
I’ve used the H5P plugin to make this quiz. The plugin is completely free and has quite many useful content types for teachers.
First, install the H5P plugin (‘Plugins’ – ‘Add new’ – Install – Activate). Select the New content option and choose Personality Quiz from the list of Content types.
In the Personality Quiz Editor add the title and a *background image (this is optional but good to have) for the Title Screen.
Then add your Personalities and their descriptions. You can also add a background image for each Personality.
The last step is to type in your questions and personalities associated with particular answers to each question. You can also add images for each question and answer options.
Once you have all your questions and answers typed in, you can select animation, the colour of the button and the progress bar, and other H5P options (display buttons, embed and allow download buttons, etc.). Then click ‘Save’, copy the quiz code and embed it in your post or page.
How to use a personality quiz in the classroom
A personality quiz can be used as a warmer or filler at almost any lesson and as a springboard for further class discussion and debate.
Follow-up activities:
- Group discussion: Ask students to think and discuss whether they’d rather work with people whose personality types are similar to theirs or people whose types are different.
- Small group/pairwork: Split students into small teams or pairs (a Cappuccino + an Espresso) and get them to discuss the quiz questions and explain their choices.
- Individual work: Elaborate on your answer – explain what you would rather do/have and why (use ELABORATOR as a scaffold)
Other personality quizzes
Check these personality quizzes based on the post TEACHERS – WHICH SEA CREATURE ARE YOU? by ELT Planning.
Happy teaching!
