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
6 replies on “Teaching Artifact”
Would it be useful to have students team up for the quizzes (at least occasionally, or for the more difficult material), so they consult each other on answers and the teams are compteting for the leaderboard?
I like this idea, Amy–I feel as though, when I let students work in teams on games for class, they get really into it. (It does seem to depend on the dynamics of each group, though, and I have no easy suggestions for how to effectively put students into teams.)
I like the idea of using a small quiz like this as a simply diagnostic to see if they’ve come prepared and since it is small and mutli choice its not a burden to grade. I also like the idea of its serving as an proof of attendance. If given at the beginning of class for a fixed period of time it creates a great incentive for students get get to class and be ready on time.
I also used to open the first few minutes for questions before giving the quiz, when I’ve done weekly in-class quizzes, and it encouraged them to review the previous material as well. (Or at least some of them did.)
I love this aspect of your reasoning: “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.” When I have taught classes where I gave quizzes, we would collectively grade them (I trusted them to grade their own) after they took them, and that actually sometimes launched interesting class discussions. (It also, once or twice, showed me where my questions were unclear in the first place.) I’ve never personally used Kahoot!, so I can’t answer your questions too much, but I do like the idea of teams on the leaderboards, as Amy recommended said.
Hi Stephanie,
Quizzes used as you are planning are so effective teaching tools. I agree that they encourage preparation for class that quickly allows you to engage meaningful interaction where your focal points can be examined and applied. Thank You for suggesting this platform. I think I’ll try it. Sincerely, Roger