Socrative for Formative Assessment

By Rachel Barry

Formative assessment is crucial for teachers to understand each student’s strengths and weaknesses as well as providing feedback prior to a summative assessment.  We have already discussed some tools for formative assessment in Mark Heintz's prior blog post, which discusses the use of Moodle and Schoology assessments to increase student motivation. I have also found that the data features of Socrative make it a great technology tool to foster immediate feedback to students while also providing teachers with a detailed report of both individual student and whole class performance.  

My PLT has created a worksheet of ten PLAN or ACT multiple choice questions per topic.  Socrative has been a great tool to convert these ten questions into an interactive tool while also providing students with immediate feedback:

I find that this feedback fosters more questions with my students of how to get the correct answer. Students go back to look at what they did wrong, instead of just accepting their score out of ten.  The comments of “Oh I thought that was the right answer!”,  “Oh, I forget the negative sign!” or something of the sort are a regular occurrence.  The immediate feedback provides students with a quick reflection piece before moving on to the next question.

The live teacher report provides me with both individual and group information.  

First, I am able to track my students’ paces. (Are they moving too quickly through the questions?  Should I have a conversation of time management with a student who spends too much time on one problem?) Next, I am able to target specific class needs, using the percentages of student success marked at the bottom. I use these percentages to determine which question(s) to go over with the whole class following completion of the activity as well as identify which skills I need to spiral back into the curriculum.  I also address individual student needs, especially in terms of multiple choice test-taking strategies.  Lastly, these reports are saved to your account, so I look back prior to unit tests, final exams, or when working over the summer on the course curriculum to target common mistakes with our population of students.