Teachers conducting regular formative assessment can help students with getting better prepared for summative assessment. Teachers can also better understand the ability, behaviour and understanding of their students and make better informed decisions, either when adapting their lessons or making a summative assessment.

Teacher Saray Herrero from Ceip Río Arlanzon in Burgos uses quiz tools such as Kahoot and Quizizz. She uses Kahoot when she wants a more competitive activity, where the question is displayed on the classroom digital board. She uses Quizizz when she wants to have students practice individually. Only the results are displayed on the teacher’s digital board.

The pedagogical aims are:

• Check the understanding and ability of students and verify their learning.
• Apply the content in different contexts.
• Develop the competence of learning to learn, i.e., the ability to initiate, organise and persist in learning. 
• Develop digital skills and cultural awareness
• The ability to motivate oneself to learn. This depends on generating curiosity and the need to learn, so that the student feels as the protagonist of the process. 

Ideally each student should have their own device. In Saray’s school, all students bring a mini-notebook as a substitute for textbooks from 4th grade on. If this is not feasible, the activity could be adapted. For instance, teachers can ask students to team up. 

Saray Herrero presents classroom polls to check, through monitoring their results, how well her students understood a certain topic to adapt classroom discussions and upcoming topics according to their needs. 

Teacher Saray says “If we work in groups, students will face another added difficulty, because they must agree in a short time on their answer”. This creates an occasion for teamwork practice, through which, they will have to explain their opinion to the others in the team and persuade them. They will have to be in constant communication.

Another option is Plickers, a classroom clicker tool that does not require students to use a digital device; only a projector for the teacher’s device and QR codes for students. The question and the possible answers appear on the digital board and the students answer through a QR code card they must rotate according to the answer they chose.

Teacher Saray uses this practice in social sciences - specifically prehistory and history. She typically splits her lessons into two sessions, in a classroom of 25 students. 

In the first session, she starts with a formative assessment with a few short open-ended questions posted on ClassDojo. She puts these questions on ClassDojo before the lesson, for students to prepare for the class. Students earn points to their avatars depending on their answers and classroom behaviour (see Figure 1). This motivates students because they try to increase both their individual points and those of their team. Additionally, this tool allows teachers to randomly select a student to answer, which helps maintaining the attention of the whole classroom.

At the end of the first session the teacher uses a Kahoot quiz to check the level of understanding. This helps to reinforce the content and identify mistakes that need more focus. At the end of each question, the teacher can analyse the answers and discuss with students. They can also look at mistakes at the end of the quiz. The teacher can download an excel file from the tool in which both incorrect answers per question and per student are recorded. This helps to analyse the results better and work in subsequent sessions on the content that was least understood. 

For instance, when she teaches prehistorical periods, she can do a Kahoot after the topic of stone age and its general characteristics (e.g. tools used, evolutionary status of humans, see Figure 2) before moving to characteristics of tools used, or moving on to the bronze and iron age topics. The correct answers are displayed on the screen, at which moment the teacher asks why each choice is right or wrong. The teacher makes note of the questions with higher errors and reinforces the content again. The time limit on the quiz can be adapted, from 30 to 90 seconds.

Teacher Saray Herrero prefers Kahoot and Plickers for formative assessment because the answers are displayed on the digital board to facilitate discussion and reviewing the answers. 

Figure 1 A classroom created on ClassDojo, managed by the teacher. Each student has a monster avatar that earns points from the teacher, depending on classroom behaviour (e.g. answered the starting lesson question).

The second session includes a reinforcement of previous topics and ends with an evaluation with Quizizz. If the class is working on the same unit for multiple sessions, the teacher reviews the contents learned several times to see how the students are learning them. 

Figure 2 An example question on Kahoot with three options:"When does the emergence of human beings begin? 1) Metal age; 2) the Paleolithic period; 3) the Neolithic period"

On the day of final evaluation, they play Quizizz. The teacher prefers Quizizz for final evaluations, because questions and answer choices can be presented randomly, and feedback can be hidden from students. Each student answers the questions on their device. Students individually see their final score, while only the teacher sees the errors. Most questions are multiple-choice with a single correct answer, but for some, students need to choose all correct answers.

In addition to this evaluation, the teacher also has an insight into each student’s classroom performance thanks to their answers recorded to review quizzes and to the ClassDojo review questions.

Figure 3 An example quiz question on Kahoot: "What is the name of the treaty that allowed Napoleon to cross Spanish borders?"

Kahoot and Quizizz both enable giving quizzes for the homework assignment and for playing live during an online session. If played in live mode from home, it would be easier to use Quizizz as students can see all questions on their devices. The teacher can give personal feedback to the students and clarify any misconceptions.

During the Covid-19 lockdown, Saray continued to use these tools when working online. At their school, they were able to continue working on poorly understood content just as they would have in person, since the classes were carried out via video calls. She ran both group and individual chats through Microsoft Teams to resolve any doubts. The communication platform also allowed to maintain continuous contact with students.