The Wiz Quiz activity targets five objectives for participants, and the design features of the activity have been identified by prior research as being conducive to the achievement of those target outcomes. Two evaluation studies conducted at three locations in 2011 examined participant perceptions of whether they are benefitting from The Wiz Quiz, as well as whether the research-based design features of the activity are being implemented in a manner that contributes to the perceived achievement of objectives. The two complete reports documenting those evaluations are available at the following links: Evaluation of The Wiz Quiz: Maplewood and Evaluation of The Wiz Quiz: Five Star.

The activity features designed to advance each target objective, the research supporting them, and the evaluation results can be found in brief form immediately below and in expanded form by clicking "Read more"

• Well-being

Subjective well-being is the relatively new term that psychologists use for happiness, and research with older adults indicates that when well-being is high, cognitive and physical health are also improved. The Wiz Quiz aims to foster well-being by maintaining a friendly and sociable atmosphere during each session in order to promote social connections among players, and by posing cognitive challenges that are designed to be approximately equivalent to the abilities of the participants. Respondents to the evaluation surveys indicated that they enjoy the sociable atmosphere, and there is also evaluation results that they find satisfaction in the level of challenge that is posed by the questions, the time limit for answering, and the competition from the opposing teams. Read more

• Memory Function

The Wiz Quiz aims to maintain memory function by engaging players in effortful mental activity, the kind of stimulation that research scientists say can stave off the observable symptoms of dementia (although not the biological pathology). The results of the evaluation studies of The Wiz Quiz indicate that participants feel The Wiz Quiz helps memory, and they claim that it engages them in mental exercise that is challenging in nature. Read more

• Comprehension/Learning

The Wiz Quiz is designed to help participants with reading and listening comprehension by refreshing or teaching the broadly shared background knowledge that writers and speakers in American society assume is known by their audiences. Most of the questions of The Wiz Quiz focus on this information, and, in that way, provide participants with useful cognitive anchors to which they can relate new ideas when they are listening and reading. Respondents in The Wiz Quiz evaluation studies reported that they learn new information during the game sessions, and they singled out conditions, such as a friendly atmosphere, that are known to be conducive to learning. Read more

• Attention

The Wiz Quiz aims to give participants repeated opportunities to exercise their “attention muscle”. Mental lapses in everyday living are often a consequence of inattention, rather than a failure to retrieve information from long term memory. Multiple features of The Wiz Quiz, including a time limit for answering questions, are designed to keep attention focused for a sustained period, and the evaluation results indicate participant perceptions that those features are achieving their purpose. Read more

• Reasoning

The Wiz Quiz also targets reasoning skills (the ability to “connect the dots” or “put two and two together”), because recent research indicates that this mental faculty begins to decline in people as early as their twenties. Many of The Wiz Quiz questions are crafted to require reasoning/problem solving, instead of straight declarative knowledge, in order to answer questions. The evaluation results suggest that participants are noticing aspects of question design that are meant to foster reasoning ability. Read more