Diagnostic testing happens before instruction begins to help determine instruction materials; formative testing is done during instruction to monitor and adjust the direction of teaching; summative testing is given to measure how well the learning objectives were met. We need to know what the student knows and how well she knows it before going into depth about the subject matter. As the class progresses, we need to know how well everyone is doing in meeting our initial goals. At the end of the learning cycle, we need to measure how well we fared. (Three additional types of assessment are discussed in a recent article here.)
Technology affords us many tools to aid us in this area — almost too many. Most of these tools are quick and easy to prepare, administer, and grade. They do not require paper, and they can be adjusted as the situation requires. Another consideration worth noting is that using them is a goal of the government.
A recent article on 17 of these digital assessment tools is here.
I used Google Forms to create a multiple-choice quiz for The Odyssey to be used in a 9th grade English class to determine how well students were keeping up with what is going on with Odysseus and his quest to get home. Knowing Odysseus’s journey well, knowing who does what, when, why, where, and how is important in understanding the value of the epic. This quiz is one of several formative assessments given throughout the reading of the poem. It is meant to help determine what holes there are in their understanding.
Below is a screenshot of the quiz:
I had five “students” take the quiz. Below is a screenshot of the response summary:
Only one person got question 3 right, which suggests to me I poorly worded it. I will rewrite the question.
As a class we will go over the quiz referencing the map we have on the wall and also here, pointing out and discussing each question in relation to time and space. We will also divide up the class into groups and divide up the questions, and have each group make a short Slides interactive presentation for each question in relation to its occurrence in The Odyssey. There are any number of interactive presentations available on the Internet, and we can use any of these as references, but having the students do their own will give them some ownership of the places and people and gods and goddesses and creatures in the story. National Geographic has a good resource here. Another good resource is here.
Other Uses for Google Forms
You can quickly create, send, and grade multiple choice, short answer, dropdown, and checkbox quizzes with Google Forms to give assessments efficiently throughout the study of a lesson. These can be a great help in steering the ship of learning. I might mention Google Forms is a bit different from Docs or Slides — it behaves differently, if you will. It is sort of like riding a mule as opposed to a horse, if you will allow me to use that analogy. Forms is a different animal.
Other Promising Tools
As mentioned above, there are a bunch of digital assessment tools out there. Another article on some of them is here. I have played with Kahoot some and will use it more. I plan to experiment with others as well.
The Google Forms quiz I made was just to see how students were doing with the chronology and characters and events. Good discussions and insights are difficult if students do not know what is happening. Accountability has to be built into the system somewhere, and doing it in a fun, inclusive way is appreciated by most students. There are many types of assessments available to teachers. I try to mix up my assessments so students don’t become bummed out taking the same kind of quiz over and over.
Technology affords us all kinds of tools to put in our assessment toolbox, and the more tools we have and the more we know how to use them the better the carpenters we are.
Focus: the Truer the Aim the Sweeter the Life
