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Kahoot as Formative Assessment



I had never heard of Kahoot until I saw it mentioned on the syllabus for a technology in education class. Upon looking up the website, it became immediately clear that this app would be a great way to conduct formative assessments. Basically, Kahoot is an app that allows anyone to create a quiz on a computer and then present that quiz to students who are able to answer each question on their smart phone or tablet. The platform itself is very engaging and would be easy to use for most high school students. One obvious shortcoming of this app is that if there are many students who do not have a smartphone it could be problematic. To solve this problem, ideally the classroom would have one or two tablets on hand to allow students to participate even if they do not have a personal device. If there is a large number of students in the class without access to a device, Kahoot also offers a team mode that could solve the problem, though it might lead to a less accurate assessment of each individual student’s understanding of the day’s topics. It is worth noting, though, that with each passing year students have more and more access to smartphones and tablets and it is conceivable that in the near future nearly all high school students will have this access.

Despite this potential problem, I think Kahoot is still very valuable. This upcoming week in the U.S. History classroom in which I am completing my 395 field experience we are studying a unit about Industrialization. For this unit, I designed a two day section about the Industrial Era in Montana (specifically with regard to the mines in Butte). On the first day we will be watching a film about Butte and on the second day the students will complete a small research assignment. I felt that Kahoot would be a great resource to use at the end of day 1 to see how successful the video was at transferring information to the students, so I created a Kahoot quiz for this purpose. This quiz would not be graded but would mainly be used by the instructor to see how well the students understood the information presented in the video (thus, it is a formative assessment). If students do not do very well on the Kahoot quiz, it would tell me, the instructor, that the students may need some more time learning about the content of the unit before they begin to conduct their own research. Thus, if need be, we could push the research assignment back one day and spend a second day learning the content so that students feel confident and knowledgeable before attempting the research portion of the unit. In this way, Kahoot will be used to inform me about student learning and could be used in nearly any social studies class in a similar manner.

To access the Kahoot quiz that I created, use this link:
https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/8a2c3f3a-52bd-412a-ab85-6c6380f1a0ab

If you are having trouble viewing this, please let me know.

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