Formative Assessment Through KAHOOT!

Kahoot is a simple, effective and an easy to use tool for formative assessment [1]. Depending upon the length, number and the complexity of the questions, any instructor can create MCQs for their course within a few minutes using this tool; and the in-class students can answer questions using their mobile phones in a fun and a participatory way. Both the aspects - creation of questions with integrated audio, visuals by instructors and that of game-based participation process by students are fairly quick, simple and exciting for students.

I have personally used it numerous times in my undergraduate class. It is for sure an effective technology tool to keep all the students engaged, even the back benchers. In fact, once the students are engaged in the competitive game of being the first one to answer, even if the students have not heard the lecture, the social learning that takes place while participation in a Kahoot game is very encouraging for the students and the instructor as well. Furthermore, not only the instructor is able to gather participatory statistics for each student and for each question in the MCQ, he/she is also able to gather statistics for the entire class, quite instantaneously. The user interface for both the mobile and the desktop is graphic and very intuitive.

I have been tracking the company/tool for a few years now, and it currently has 70+ million users [2]. Furthermore, creators of Kahoot can share their lessons. I.e. if I have created a bunch of MCQs on a particular subject, I can make them publicly available for others to use and to integrate them in their classroom settings.

In my opinion, it is one of the best tools available which drastically increase the ease of conducting formative assessment exercises in a traditional classroom setting in an efficient manner. [3]

REFERENCES -

1. Cope& Kalantzis, 2018: https://www.coursera.org/learn/ubiquitouslearning/home/week/2

2. The Software/Company, 2018: https://kahoot.com/company/

3. A Case Study, 2018: https://kahoot.com/blog/2018/09/13/formative-assessment-case-study-history-teacher/