How Kahoot! can improve teachers' formative assessment. If you are training to be a teacher or if your want to know how to use edtech to actually help people learn, this is worth reading! Read more on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2q7B3ry

1. How Kahoot! can be used to improve
trainee teachers’ formative assessment
Pete Atherton

2. Summary
• What is Kahoot!?
• Demonstration of Kahoot!
• My action research
• Wider context – connectivism
• Where we are now - edtech

3. What is Kahoot!?
• A game-based student response system
(G.S.R.S)
• Often used as a fun quiz BUT:

4. Kahoot!’s potential
• Develop high order thinking skills?
AND
• Pupils’ metacognition?
• Teachers’ questioning skills?

5. This paper
• A small scale research project into how to use
Kahoot! for formative assessment.

6. Why?
• To examine trainees’ strengths and training
needs in terms of assessment.
• Could Kahoot! could help trainees provide
more powerful evidence of formative
assessment?

7. Personal Reflection - now
• Research interest in social media literacies and
academic research
• Writing 50 Ways to Use Technology in the
Classroom (Sage)

8. How?
Data drawn from:
• Kahoot! Surveys
• Kahoot! Quizzes
• Questionnaires
• Case studies

9. Who and where?
• Used a cohort of trainee teachers at two
universities in the north of England

10. Literature Objectives
To assess the challenges in using edtech (using lit
from circa 2010 onwards).

11. Context
• ‘Digital natives’ expect to learn differently
(Prensky, 2001, 2012).
• The rise of ‘social natives’ (Foulger, 2014)
• The renewed emphasis on assessment for I.T.T
(Carter, 2015)

12. What might the research reveal?
• Kahoot! and other
edtech retards the
development of high
order thinking skills.
• Removes both skill and
authority from the
teacher (Sadler, 2015).

13. Carter Review of I.T.T (2015)
• Trainees need a more critical and
comprehensive understanding of assessment
(Carter, 2015)
AND
• How to employ data productively in planning
lessons and setting targets.

14. Broader Context
• Mastery learning
• Gamified learning
• The ‘connectivist classroom’

15. Formative Assessment – Post ‘levels’
‘Mastery learning’
• Deeper, consolidated understanding of fewer
topics
(Guskey, 2012, cited in McIntosh, 2015)

16. Gamified Learning
Kahoot’s interface is designed to sustain intrinsic
motivation by:
• creating a fantasy world
• stimulating and sustaining curiosity
• presenting levels of challenge (Malone, 1980,
cited in Wang, 2014).

17. Connectivism
• The pipe itself is more important than its
contents (Siemens, 2005)

18. The ‘Connectivist’ classroom
• Frequent assessment but..
• Information and decisions on what to do with
it, are always in flux (Siemens, 2005).

19. The Connectivist Classroom
• Problem-solving and the navigation around
seemingly infinite knowledge (Donnelly, 2010,
Brown, 2005).

20. Connectivist Classroom
Need to collaborate and negotiate with
knowledge increased
Greater need for interaction in real time to:
• improve motivation
• enable learners to act on feedback (Dron and
Anderson 2014)

21. Connectivist Classroom
• Knowledge is a decentralised continuum
(McLoughlin and Lee, 2008).
• Need to teach skills to acquire the knowledge
• Knowledge is constantly flowing, as if through
a pipe (Siemens, 2005).

22. Benefits of Connectivism
• Pleasure in the discovery of new knowledge -
a serendipity. Huang et al (2014)

23. The Connectivist Classroom
• The learner, then, is the kernel of both
knowledge and discussion (Friesen and Lowe,
2010).
BUT….

24. Critique of Connectivism
• Too learner-centred
• Ignores the expertise of the teacher
• Can inhibit the development of high order
thinking skills (Sadler, 2015)
• Draws from Prensky’s (2001) ideas about
‘digital natives’, which have no empirical data
(Helsper, 2009: 3)

25. The myth of the ‘digital native’
Do ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001, 2012) really
have ‘digital literacy’ (Harmes, 2015)?
• Problem-solving
• Using appropriate registers
• Self-regulation
• Digital creativity

26. What we did with Kahoot!
• We did a ‘blind Kahoot!’
for new knowledge
with some deliberately
hard questions.
Then..
They played again in
‘ghost mode’ against their
previous score.

27. Playing again in ‘ghost mode’
Quantitative: Scores rose by between 40 and
50%.
Qualitative: ‘It forces you to use abstract
thought’.
‘You can learn things unexpectedly’
‘Reinforces new knowledge’.

28. What we did with Kahoot!
• We completed a Kahoot! Survey and worked
in pairs

29. Emerging Themes from Sample
• Unclear on formative assessment,
confident on using edtech
• Unclear on how to differentiate and
stretch and challenge.
• Little thought given to preparing questions
in advance.

30. Edtech yes, assessment no - how will
they bridge the gap?

31. Emerging Themes
• Playing in ‘ghost mode’ helps learners accept
that they can learn from being wrong.
• Kahoot! can help trainees develop their
learners' metacognitive skills.
• The importance of collaborative learning with
Kahoot!.

32. Emerging Themes
Trainee A
‘Kahoot! Is a source to see current knowledge
and how to build on it.’

33. Ghost mode (cont’d)
• Learners can analyse, why one answer was
correct and the other was not.
• ‘Ghost Mode' encourages self-efficacy
through giving a chance to improve and
monitor one's own progress

34. Ghost mode (cont’d)
• ‘I used more areas of my brain to think about
whether I had already learnt something and to
make connections.’
• ‘I learned by getting things wrong’.

35. Useful for formative assessment?
• Kahoot!. They have an immediate chance to
rectify mistakes and improve.
• Could secure basic knowledge throughout the
year.

36. Proposals for further work
• Other edtech platforms and assessment
• Interrogating the literacies of the ‘social
native’ (Foulger, 2014)

37. Where we are now
Emerging edtech
• Assessment tools
• Video for formative assessment
• Social media for formative assessment
• Gamified formative assessment

38. How you can help
• Blog on http://edtechblogs.com
• Tell your story
• Share on social media