Author: Stefanie Gisler

I will incorporate Kahoot! for my weekly short quizzes and to poll students during class. For this blog post, I will focus on the short quizzes. In my in-person Social Psychology classes, students used to take short quizzes at the beginning of class whenever a new topic was introduced. The quizzes consisted of five relatively easy multiple-choice questions that were based on the textbook. The purposes of these quizzes were to encourage students to read the textbook and to take attendance. I would display each question on separate PowerPoint slides. Students recorded their responses on an answer sheet, which I collected at the end of the quiz. Students who arrived late would miss some or all the questions.

The revised version of the short quizzes will be hosted on Kahoot!. Similarly to the old version, the quizzes will consist of five multiple-choice questions, and I will display only one question at the time. The main differences are that we will review and discuss the quizzes immediately after students completed them. I hope that this immediate feedback will help students learn the material and increase engagement by fostering discussion. I actually learned about Kahoot! from a fellow seminar attendee who has used Kahoot! in their online synchronous courses.

There are still some aspects I need to work out. For the short quizzes, I need a way to track each student’s score. Kahoot! provides assessment reports, but I will likely need to figure out how to track students’ usernames. I am also unsure to what degree I want to gamify my overall course. How many polls should I include in each class? Should I make some of my polls competitive (e.g., show leaderboards at the end of the class)? Should I include other features of Kahoot!, such as word cloud? 

Below is an example of the type of multiple-choice question I will use for my short quizzes:

________ attitudes are based primarily on people’s beliefs about properties of attitude objects.

a. Affectively based 

b. Intention-based

c. Evaluatively based 

d. Cognitively based

I will incorporate Kahoot! in my synchronous Social Psychology course (thank you so much Kaitlin Busse for the suggestion!). I plan on using Kahoot! in two ways. 

First, I will use it as a platform for the weekly short quizzes. In my in-person Social Psychology course, students took a short quiz when we started a new topic at the beginning of class. The short quizzes were solely based on the textbook chapters. I would hand out a piece of paper with five multiple choice questions, and students had approximately 5 minutes to complete the quiz. The purpose of the quizzes was to encourage students to read the textbook chapters and to track attendance. Students could miss three quizzes without any repercussions. When I first started teaching Social Psychology, I used PollEverywhere and students loved it. Unfortunately, there were a lot of technical issues with the website, which is why I decided to switch to paper-and-pencil tests. I hope that Kahoot! will be a good replacement. I plan to review the answers immediately after all quizzes have been submitted.

Second, I plan to use Kahoot! for polls throughout the lectures to keep students engaged. I am still trying to decide how many polls would make sense in a 2.5 hour class. 

If any of you have used Kahoot! in your courses, I would love to hear about your experiences!

Hi! Nice meeting you! Could you introduce yourself? What department are you from? What courses are you teaching or have been teaching? What are the classes you teach like, such as format or class size? Is there anything you want to tell us about your teaching, research, or other projects? 

Hi Everyone, my name is Stefanie Gisler Larsen, and I am a 6th-year student in Baruch College’s I-O Psychology program. My research focuses on employee well-being and recovery from work.

I have been teaching since Fall 2017, and I have taught Social Psychology, I-O Psychology, and General Psychology. I first taught all my courses in-person, but switched to exclusively teaching General Psychology online asynchronous in 2019. My courses have always had 25-30 students. This Spring, I will teach Social Psychology in an online synchronous format for the first time, which will be a completely new experience for me. I feel like I will be one of the only instructors who have never taught an online synchronous course, and I hope that I will be able to learn from your experiences!

Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? 

I taught Social Psychology in-person from Fall 2017 until 2018, and I will teach if for the first time in an online synchronous format this Spring semester. It will also be the first time that I teach it in one block per week (2h55m).

In my in-person courses, students took weekly short quizzes and two exams. They also wrote two papers and delivered a group presentation at the end of the semester. Further, the course had many in-class activities. I plan to completely revise the course in order to make it more compatible with an online synchronous format, but I hope to still include plenty of engaging activities/assignments.

What are the listed learning goals of your course? They could be ones provided by the department, or ones that you have written for your syllabus? Please list them (pasting is fine!).

These were the learning goals for my in-person Social Psychology course, but I hope to revise them and/or add some new ones for my upcoming course:

1. Understand social psychological concepts, theories, and findings
2. Relate social psychological concepts, theories, and findings to current events, society,history, pop culture, and your everyday life
3. Develop effective skills in written communication through application papers
4. Effectively deliver a coherent presentation to the class using presentation software
5. Consider how diversity and technology influence social situations as well as the field ofsocial psychology

What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?

I would like to develop new in-class activities and assignments that work well in a synchronous format. I hope that students will find them interesting and engaging. I have heard from my colleagues that it can be tricky to keep students engaged in synchronous courses, especially when each lecture spans multiple hours.