Google FORMative Assessment

Should I try Google Forms?

Are you an educator? Do you like timely and instantaneous feedback? Do you use formative assessment practices on a daily basis? Do your students have access to an internet-capable device? If you can give an honest yes to these question (as all educators should) then you should give Google Forms a try today!

What is it?

Google Forms is one of the many Google Suite applications (you may have heard of some of these before: Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites, etc…) that allows you to build and administer both quizzes and surveys. You can build a custom survey from scratch or start with a template like the exit ticket template seen here. Google Forms offers a variety of question types to meet your needs however you best see fit: short answer, multiple choice, checkboxes, drop-down, checkbox grid, and linear scale. One of the best parts about this application is that all of your data is saved and stored in a Google Spreadsheet, so it can be accessed instantly! All you need to do is create the form and share the link with whoever it is you want completing your form. You can also jazz it up and turn it into a QR code using QR Code Generator.

How Forms can be Used

Google Forms can be used in a variety of ways. Get creative with it. Cathy Maher talks about the creative ways in which she puts Google Forms to use here. As she states, Forms can be used by teachers as a productivity tool to gather information about Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), share reports of events happening at school, as well as create and utilize grade level discipline forms. Because all of the submitted forms are stored in a single place, it makes managing and tracking data a breeze. Teachers at my school even use a Google Form to track student bathroom trips.

While there are plenty of ways Forms can be used for teacher productivity, there are even more ways to use Forms as a platform to improve teaching and learning for students. A get to know you survey to start the year is a great way to learn about your students, and get to know their interests in a non-threatening way. You can also use Forms as a formative assessment technique to check for student understanding. If I haven’t already mentioned it, Google Forms has a quiz feature where it can collect and auto-grade student responses. You can use forms as a Summative assessment tool or to formatively collect data from students about their understanding of a topic. The possibilities are truly endless with your creativity at the wheel.

How I Used it

For my purpose of collecting feedback from my 7th and 8th grade students about their takeaways from the augmented reality (AR) geometry unit, along with measuring their overall engagement, Google Forms is the perfect tool. In the Self Reflection Survey I administered after my AR unit, I asked a variety of questions about quality of pedagogical practices as well as learning outcomes. For these two sections, the likert scale-type response options were strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, and strongly disagree. The survey concluded with open-ended responses regarding teacher actions students found helpful, along with teacher actions that were least helpful. All of the data collected will be analyzed further to determine if students' learning outcomes improved from the use of AR in the classroom and if it increased the level of engagement.

Data Collection

Currently, I am still in the process of reviewing and analyzing the data gathered from students. My next step is to code their responses. At a glance there a few major takeaways. The major first takeaway comes from how greatly the responses varied. Specifically, there was great variability in students' responses about activities they found most helpful, as well as those they found least helpful. This absolutely makes sense because I have students at two different grade-levels in the class, with varied levels of exposure to geometry concepts, not to mentions individual differences in learning styles. This unit involved many different learning opportunities, including movement, AR using HP Reveal, video explanations, and a variety of homework for additional practice. Further, it makes sense that individual students have different preferred activities, again because of their varied grade levels, prior knowledge, and learning styles. My second major takeaway is come from how honest students are when you let them know they are taking an anonymous survey. Students who typically do not speak up in the classroom are able to share their thoughts and ask the specific questions they had without the pressure of talking to me face-to-face.

To Summarize

Surveys are a great way to formatively assess students. They help you, as the instructor, determine if the class is ready to move on and inform your future instruction, based on students' needs. Surveys give students a platform where they can be honest and open in their feedback. Google Forms is one of my favorite free survey tools because of its versatility and efficient collection/organization of data in a Google Sheet. I would recommend this tool to anyone who is looking to poll or survey a group because of its user-friendly features and overall accessibility. Google Forms has made data collection for my Action Research so much easier. Moving forward, I will be using this tool regularly to formatively assess students and their unique learning needs.

#ar #google #forms