Bell Ringer Activities: 45 That Respect the Evidence

Every list of bell ringer ideas online tells you to hook the class, settle them fast and get the lesson started. None of them mention the one classroom experiment that tested where in a lesson that task should sit. It found the bell ringer slot was the weak one.

A bell ringer is a short task learners begin the moment they arrive, usually three to five minutes long, done independently and without teacher input. American teachers also call it bell work, morning work or a warm-up. British teachers call the same slot a starter, and teachers trained through Teach Like a Champion call it a Do Now.

The evidence matters here because it points at one design decision. McDaniel and colleagues (2011) ran quizzes with 139 eighth-grade science learners at three different points: before the teacher taught the material, straight after, and 24 hours before the unit test. Quizzing before the lesson produced no significant gain over not quizzing at all. Quizzing after the lesson worked. Quizzing near the test worked best of all. So in a real classroom, measured a month later, a bell ringer that reviews last week's learning is doing the thing that worked and one that previews today's topic is doing the thing that did not. That is not the whole story, and the part the ranking pages never reach is set out below.

That is the whole article in one paragraph, and it changes what you put on the board tomorrow. If you are in a hurry, skip to the 45 bell ringers and come back for the evidence. The rest is the evidence in more detail, the honest limits of it, and 45 bell ringers by subject that respect the finding.

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What Is a Bell Ringer?

A bell ringer is a short, independent task waiting for learners as they walk in, designed to be started without instruction from the teacher. It typically runs three to five minutes, is written rather than spoken, and is marked or reviewed quickly before the main lesson begins. Its usual justification is that it recovers time otherwise lost to the start of a lesson.

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Bell Ringer, Bell Work, Starter, Do Now: The Terms Are Not Synonyms

They describe the same slot in the timetable and they come from different systems with different purposes. Knowing which one you mean stops you borrowing a rationale that does not apply.

• Bell ringer and bell work are American, named after the period bell, and their stated purpose is usually settling and recovering transition time.
• Do Now is American too, from the charter-school lineage, and is codified as a technique in Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion. Its defining feature is that it needs no teacher input at all.
• Starter is a British policy artefact with a date. The National Numeracy Strategy, in English primary schools from September 1999, prescribed a three-part lesson of oral and mental work, main activity, then plenary. "Starter", "main" and "plenary" entered UK teacher vocabulary from that document, spread out of primary maths across the curriculum, and were pitched as teaching rather than as settling.
• Retrieval starter is the current UK version, shaped by cognitive science CPD since roughly 2015, and is the one closest to what the evidence supports.

The practical difference is real. A starter was designed to teach. A bell ringer was designed to settle. If you run a bell ringer and expect the learning gains reported for retrieval practice, you need it to be doing retrieval, not compliance. Our full guide to the Do Now and its five design rules covers the codified version.

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What the Evidence Actually Says

The honest position is that the underlying mechanism is exceptionally well evidenced in laboratories, moderately well evidenced in classrooms, and untested in the exact form most teachers use it. Three findings do real work for a teacher, and one of them contradicts standard bell ringer advice.

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The Placement Study, and Why It Should Change Your Bell Ringer

McDaniel, Agarwal, Huelser, McDermott and Roediger (2011) worked with 139 eighth-grade science learners across five curriculum units in a public middle school. Low-stakes multiple-choice quizzes with feedback were delivered at three placements: pre-lesson, after learners had read the chapter but before the teacher taught it; post-lesson, immediately after teaching; and review, 24 hours before the unit exam. The teacher left the room during pre-lesson quizzes so she could not bias her teaching toward quizzed items. The unit exam came around 31 days later.

On the unit exam, non-quizzed content scored .64. Pre-lesson quizzing scored .69, an effect size of 0.22 that did not reach significance. Post-lesson quizzing scored .77. Review quizzing scored .86, an effect size of 1.13. Combining pre-lesson quizzing with either of the others added nothing.

The authors also checked whether a pre-lesson quiz at least primed learners to absorb the lesson that followed. It did not: 78 per cent on content quizzed beforehand against 76 per cent on content not quizzed beforehand, a difference that went nowhere.

Read plainly, that says the retrieval benefit comes from quizzing material learners have already been taught, and the closer to the assessment the better. A bell ringer reviewing last week's lesson is a review quiz that happens to sit at the start of today's. That is the strong condition. A bell ringer previewing today's new topic is the pre-lesson condition, and in that study it did nothing.

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The Case for Preview, Which Is Better Than We First Said

An honest article has to carry the other half of this, because the pretesting literature does not agree with the classroom finding above.

Pan and Sana (2021) ran five experiments with a combined 1,573 participants studying expository passages, each paired with either a pretest or a posttest. Both beat a no-test control, and pretesting produced the higher overall scores, an advantage that held across test formats. Richland, Kornell and Kao (2009) had already shown that even unsuccessful retrieval attempts before studying can enhance later learning. King-Shepard and colleagues (2025) have since meta-analysed the prequestion literature.

So why did the classroom study find nothing? The reconciliation that holds is about scope. Pretesting reliably helps the specific material the prequestion asked about, and does little or nothing for the material it did not ask about. Review quizzing strengthens everything it covers. In the classroom study, a pre-lesson quiz covered a fraction of a unit and the exam came a month later, which is the condition where that difference bites hardest. In the laboratory studies, learners studied the passage immediately and were tested within two days.

The usable rule for a teacher is narrower and more honest than "preview does not work". If you preview, you are buying attention on the one point you asked about, and paying for it everywhere else. That is sometimes exactly the trade you want, on the day's hardest idea. It is a poor default for a daily five-minute routine covering a whole unit, which is why the strategies below review.

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The Classroom Evidence for Quizzing Itself

Roediger, Agarwal, McDaniel and McDermott (2011) ran low-stakes clicker quizzes with 142 sixth-grade social studies learners on their real course material, using the actual graded chapter and semester exams as outcomes. On the end-of-semester exam, quizzed content scored 79 per cent against 67 per cent for content that was not quizzed. On the anxiety worry teachers always raise, 65 per cent of learners said the quizzes decreased their test anxiety, though that is self-reported attitude data and should be offered as reassurance rather than proof.

Agarwal, Nunes and Blunt (2021) then screened nearly 2,000 abstracts to produce a systematic review of retrieval practice in real schools: 50 experiments, 49 effect sizes, 5,374 learners. The headline is that most effects were positive. The honest breakdown is more useful: 16 large, 12 medium, 18 small or very small, and three negative. The authors flag publication bias themselves. They also report something awkward, which is that classroom results ran opposite to the laboratory on the effect of delay, with larger effects at short delays rather than long ones. Only 6 per cent of the experiments came from non-WEIRD countries, which matters if you teach in an international school.

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The Counter-Intuitive Bit That Makes Teachers Give Up Too Early

Roediger and Karpicke's (2006) foundational laboratory study is usually reported as "testing beats studying". What it actually found is more useful. At five minutes, repeated studying beat repeated testing. At two days and one week, testing beat studying substantially.

So the benefit is delayed, and it costs you performance in the short run. A teacher who runs a bell ringer quiz and judges it by how the class does that morning is measuring the one interval where the effect runs backwards. Judge it on the end-of-unit test. This is the same mechanism described in our guide to retrieval practice.

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What Is Not Established

Three claims made confidently on competing pages have no good evidence behind them, and saying so is more useful than repeating them.

That a daily bell ringer routine raises attainment. The classroom studies quiz specific curriculum items at controlled points across a unit. That is not the same intervention as running a task every single morning for a year, and no trial of the latter appears in the literature.

That bell ringers recover lost teaching time. The most-quoted number here traces to Saloviita's (2008) Finnish study of 131 lesson starts, which found the teacher arrived on average two minutes late and the lesson began on average six minutes late. Three things need saying. The paper calls itself a preliminary study in its own title. Its own summary reports that 84 per cent of observers judged that the lesson began without delay and in good order. And Finnish schools do not use bell ringers, and barely use bells for lesson starts at all. The widely repeated "five weeks a year" figure is arithmetic performed on that six-minute average, not an observation.

That drilling recall builds the ability to apply. Pan and Rickard's (2018) meta-analysis of transfer found the testing effect is strongest for the exact material retrieved and transfers less readily to new formats and contexts. A bell ringer drilling definitions is building recall of definitions.

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What Rosenshine and Lemov Actually Say

Both are cited constantly in support of bell ringers, and both say something slightly different from what is attributed to them. Rosenshine's first principle is about review, not preview. Lemov's fourth criterion permits both, and on the placement evidence one half of it is weaker than the other.

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Rosenshine's Principle 1

The heading reads: "Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning: Daily review can strengthen previous learning and can lead to fluent recall." On timing, he writes that the most effective teachers in the studies "began their lessons with a five- to eight-minute review of previously covered material".

Two honest notes. His supporting example in the article is a single elementary mathematics experiment in which teachers spent eight minutes a day on review, and he gives no citation for it in the body text. And Principles of Instruction is a synthesis published in a teachers' union magazine, adapted from an earlier practitioner report, not a study or a meta-analysis. It is influential and broadly consistent with the evidence, and it is routinely miscited in school CPD as research in its own right. Our guide to Rosenshine's principles sets out all ten.

What matters for your board is the word "previous". Principle 1 is not a preview and not a settling activity.

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Lemov's Do Now Criteria

Lemov sets four criteria. The task sits in the same place every day so starting becomes a habit. It is fully independent, and if you have to give directions it is not independent enough. It takes three to five minutes and requires putting pencil to paper. And it either previews the day's lesson or reviews a recent one.

The commonest failure he names is not the task but the review of it: teachers lose track of time and spend fifteen minutes going over a five-minute activity. His cap is five minutes for the review.

The fourth criterion is where practitioner advice and classroom evidence part company. Preview and review are offered as equivalent options. The placement experiment tested exactly that comparison and found them a long way from equivalent. Nothing stops you previewing. It just should not be described as retrieval practice, because it is not doing what retrieval practice does. Do Now is one of the 63 moves in our complete guide to Teach Like a Champion.

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45 Bell Ringers That Respect the Evidence

Jump straight to your subject: Works in Any Subject (12) · English (8) · Maths (8) · Science (7) · Humanities (6) · Languages (4). Every item reviews something already taught, can be started without instruction, needs nothing beyond pen and paper, and fits inside five minutes.

Every item below reviews something already taught, can be started without instruction, needs nothing beyond pen and paper, and fits inside five minutes. Anything requiring the teacher to explain it first has been left out on purpose, because that is the criterion most bell ringer lists quietly break.

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Works in Any Subject

1. Three questions from last lesson, one from last week, one from last term.
2. Brain dump: write everything you remember about a named topic in three minutes.
3. Two truths and a lie about yesterday's content, written for a partner to solve.
4. Fill the gaps in a paragraph summarising the previous lesson.
5. Name five key terms from this unit and define two of them.
6. Correct the deliberately wrong worked answer on the board.
7. What did we learn yesterday that changes something you thought last week?
8. Draw the diagram from last lesson from memory, then check it.
9. Write the question that this answer belongs to.
10. Rank these four ideas from most to least important and give one reason.
11. Sentence starter: "The most confusing thing about this topic is..." Then answer it.
12. Ten-second recall: list as many examples as you can, then count them.

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English

13. Quote recall: write the quotation that proves a named character trait.
14. Improve this sentence using a subordinate clause.
15. Identify the technique in this line and say what it does.
16. Write one sentence summarising last lesson's chapter, in under fifteen words.
17. Two spellings from last week's list, used in new sentences.
18. Which of these three thesis statements is strongest, and why?
19. Punctuate this paragraph correctly.
20. Name the narrator, the setting and the central conflict of the text so far.

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Maths

21. Four questions: one from yesterday, one from last week, one from last term, one from last year.
22. Find the error in this worked solution and say which step it is in.
23. Estimate the answer before calculating, then calculate.
24. Write a word problem whose answer is 24.
25. Which of these four answers is impossible, and how do you know without working it out?
26. Convert between three forms: fraction, decimal, percentage.
27. Sketch the graph from memory and label two features.
28. True or false, with a reason, for five statements about a topic from last month.

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Science

29. Label the diagram from last lesson with the sheet turned over.
30. Write the word equation, then the symbol equation.
31. Name the independent, dependent and control variables in this described experiment.
32. Explain a named process in exactly three steps.
33. Which piece of apparatus is wrong in this diagram, and what should it be?
34. Give one everyday example of a principle covered last term.
35. Define these three terms without using the word itself.

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History, Geography and the Humanities

36. Put these five events in order and date two of them.
37. One cause, one consequence, one thing historians disagree about.
38. Label the blank map with five features from last unit.
39. Which of these two sources is more useful, and for what question?
40. Write the definition of a key term, then an example, then a non-example.
41. Summarise last lesson's argument in one sentence, then give the strongest objection to it.

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Languages

42. Ten words from last week, English to target language.
43. Conjugate a verb covered last month in three tenses.
44. Correct the five errors in this short paragraph.
45. Write three sentences using a structure taught last term, not last lesson.

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Running It Well

The design of the task matters less than the four routines around it, and those routines are where most bell ringers quietly fail. Same place every day, a hard cap on the review, answers the class can check themselves, and content pulled from further back than yesterday. Get those four right and almost any sensible task will work.

Put it in the same place every day. If learners have to ask where it is, you have given an instruction, and the independence has gone.

Cap the review. Five minutes maximum going over it. This is the single commonest failure, and it converts a five-minute routine into a twenty-minute one that eats the lesson.

Make the answers available. A task learners can mark themselves gives immediate feedback, which is the condition under which the classroom quizzing studies produced their effects.

Reach back further than yesterday. Spacing matters. Cepeda and colleagues (2006) found in their synthesis of verbal recall studies that distributing practice beats massing it, and their 2008 work found the optimal gap grows with how long you need the material to last. A bell ringer that only ever revisits yesterday is massed practice with a nice routine around it. Pull from last week and last term as well, which is what a retrieval grid is designed to make easy.

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Adapting Bell Ringers for Learners with SEND

An independent written task at the start of a lesson is harder than it looks for several groups of learners, and the standard advice to "just start" ignores all of them.

For learners with slow processing or writing difficulty, the three-minute cap is the barrier rather than the content. Shorten the task rather than extending the time, so the class finishes together. Three questions beat five.

For learners with working memory difficulties, a blank page with an open prompt is the hardest possible format. Give a partly completed version: a gapped paragraph, a labelled diagram with two labels missing, a table with the first row filled in.

For anxious learners, an unfamiliar task on arrival is an unpredictable event at the point of the day they are least regulated. Predictability does the work here. A format that is identical every day, with only the content changing, removes the uncertainty while keeping the retrieval.

For learners who arrive late or dysregulated, treat the bell ringer as a re-entry ramp rather than a test. A task that is impossible to start halfway through will be refused. One that can be joined at any point will be attempted.

None of this lowers the expectation. It changes the format so the retrieval can happen, which is the point of the five minutes.

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Limitations and Critiques

The retrieval mechanism underneath bell ringers is sound, and the specific routine is far less well evidenced than its popularity suggests. The gap between those two sentences is where most confident advice on this subject lives. Four qualifications are worth holding on to before you build a department policy.

The daily routine has never been trialled. Everything above is inference from studies that quizzed specific items at specific points. It is reasonable inference. It is not the same as evidence that the routine works.

Nearly all classroom studies are within-subject. They compare quizzed and unquizzed items inside the same class, which controls beautifully for differences between learners and controls for nothing about whether the five minutes would have been better spent another way. The opportunity cost of a daily bell ringer has not been measured.

The classroom and laboratory literatures disagree. Agarwal and colleagues found larger effects at short delays, the opposite of the laboratory pattern. When two literatures disagree on a central parameter, the lab findings should not be transferred unexamined.

The evidence base is narrow geographically. Six per cent of the experiments in the systematic review came from non-WEIRD countries. For an international school with a multilingual intake, that is a real limitation rather than a footnote.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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References and Further Reading

Every reference below was checked twice: once to confirm it exists, and again to confirm the record it resolves to is the study being cited. Links go to the original publisher rather than to an aggregator. Where a source is a practitioner synthesis rather than a study, that is stated.

1. Pretesting versus posttesting: Comparing the pedagogical benefits of errorful generation and retrieval practice. Pan, S. C., and Sana, F. (2021). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 27(2). Five experiments, 1,573 participants, and pretesting came out ahead. The counterweight to the placement study, and the reason this article does not say preview never works.
2. The pretesting effect: Do unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance learning? Richland, L. E., Kornell, N., and Kao, L. S. (2009). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15(3). Failing at a question before you are taught the answer can still help.
3. The effect of prequestions on learning: A multilevel meta-analysis. King-Shepard, Q., Walker, J., Nokes-Malach, T. J., Carpenter, S. K., and Fraundorf, S. H. (2025). Educational Psychology Review. The current synthesis of the prequestion literature.
4. Test-enhanced learning in a middle school science classroom: The effects of quiz frequency and placement. McDaniel, M. A., Agarwal, P. K., Huelser, B. J., McDermott, K. B., and Roediger, H. L. (2011). Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(2), 399-414. The single most useful study here, and the only one that tested where in a lesson the quiz should sit. One school, one teacher's classes, eighth-grade science, so treat it as the best available rather than as settled.
5. Test-enhanced learning in the classroom: Long-term improvements from quizzing. Roediger, H. L., Agarwal, P. K., McDaniel, M. A., and McDermott, K. B. (2011). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 17(4), 382-395. 142 sixth-graders, real course content, and the outcomes were the actual graded exams rather than a researcher's test.
6. Retrieval practice consistently benefits student learning: A systematic review of applied research in schools and classrooms. Agarwal, P. K., Nunes, L. D., and Blunt, J. R. (2021). Educational Psychology Review, 33(4), 1409-1453. The honest place to start. Read the distribution of effect sizes, not the headline, and note the authors' own warning about publication bias.
7. Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Roediger, H. L., and Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255. The laboratory foundation, and the source of the finding that testing loses to studying in the short term and wins over days and weeks. Undergraduates and prose passages, not a school study.
8. The effect of testing versus restudy on retention: A meta-analytic review of the testing effect. Rowland, C. A. (2014). Psychological Bulletin, 140(6), 1432-1463. The scale of the laboratory evidence in one place.
9. Transfer of test-enhanced learning: Meta-analytic review and synthesis. Pan, S. C., and Rickard, T. C. (2018). Psychological Bulletin, 144(7), 710-756. The corrective on transfer. Retrieval strengthens what was retrieved, and generalises less than teachers hope.
10. Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., and Rohrer, D. (2006). Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354-380. Note the title precisely: verbal recall tasks, not all learning.
11. Spacing effects in learning: A temporal ridgeline of optimal retention. Cepeda, N. J., Vul, E., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T., and Pashler, H. (2008). Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095-1102. How long the gap should be, and the answer is longer than most teachers assume.
12. The effects of overlearning and distributed practise on the retention of mathematics knowledge. Rohrer, D., and Taylor, K. (2006). Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(9), 1209-1224. Subject-specific, and finds that piling extra practice into one session is poor value against spacing it.
13. Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know. Rosenshine, B. (2012). American Educator, 36(1), 12 onwards. Free full text. A practitioner synthesis in a teachers' union magazine, adapted from an earlier report for the International Academy of Education, not a study. Principle 1 is the daily review, and it says review of previous learning.
14. Classroom management and loss of time at the lesson start: A preliminary study. Saloviita, T. (2008). International Journal of Environmental and Science Education, 3(3). Free full text. 131 lesson starts in Finland. Read the paper before quoting the six minutes, because its own summary reports that 84 per cent of observers judged lessons began without delay.
15. Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college. Lemov, D. (2021). Jossey-Bass. The Do Now criteria quoted here come from Lemov's own organisation rather than from the book text.