MAKING IT EASIER TO BE A BETTER TEACHER

Noteworthy News

Here’s our weekly roundup of interesting education stories from around the world:

• Kindergarten teachers - new study shows a link between nose-picking and Alzheimer’s disease!

•  It’s not just in your head - here’s why time moves slower when you’re a kid.

• Too many kids are ‘faking’ their reading skills - here’s how one board is tackling it.

TECH TALK

Nerves = lower grades

Quizzes aren’t always the most accurate indicator of student success. This is because any kind of test comes along with some anxiety for many students.

This can lead to students becoming disengaged with the assessment quickly, resulting in artificially poor academic performance.

Gamification might work, but the novelty of quiz games like Kahoot have worn off for many students.

The Solution: Gimkit

This app is Kahoot on steroids. It combines the model of instant game-show quizzes with personal gamified elements. You still create or import your questions, but then everything changes.

Students see your questions on their own devices to answer and not the projected screen which instead shows the status of the game itself.

Each correctly answered question advances students in 1 of 5 games (teacher choice) and can lead to winning in-game ‘virtual money’ (100% no monetary value). Students can use this fake cash to buy game upgrades and items. 

The gamification elements of leaderboards and healthy competition are still here, but now with an exciting added element.

Students should be used to this model as some of the most popular video games use a similar model of completing tasks to buy only cosmetic upgrades for their game.

How About YOUR Classroom?

Like the first time you used Kahoot, it can quickly get super competitive. Lay down the ground rules as usual, and ensure that any projected elements are age appropriate.

Gimkit can be used to complete tasks individually (such as for homework practice), or in a variety of team-based competitions.

In either option, we’re not just talking about getting the most questions right. Oh no, no. That’s a Kahoot thing - Gimkit does things differently.

Gimkit comes with 5 different game modes for your classroom. Each of these have their own goals that can be molded to your assessment purpose. Here are our favorites below.

Strategies

1. Snowbrawl: this combines answering questions with a snowball fight - all happening live on screen. The more correct answers a student gets, the more virtual snowballs they can throw at other players.

2. Blastball: take a team sport like soccer and combine it with a multiple choice quiz - this is Blastball. This is much less chaotic than Snowbrawl when it comes to questions, but is just as engaging. Students have to concentrate on moving their player while answering questions in order to shoot the ball.

No matter the game choice, each of these modes allow your students to practice questions or even take final quizzes. Gimkit will track student progress and even spit out a report for you to keep a close eye on student progress.

The free version of Gimkit gives you full access for as many students as you want but only for 3 games at a time. Subscription options unlock everything and start at $14.99/month USD. Both options allow for reporting.

Gamifying assessments is one way to get rid of some quiz-anxiety. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

BRAINY BITS

Not All Tests Are Created Equal

At the end of the day, few students will want to take a test, but research has shown that they can be one of the most powerful teacher tools.

The Study: Teaching Creative Writing In Primary Schools 

Not all tests are created equal. This week’s paper is a commentary -  consider these the almost-opinion pieces of the research world. The difference is that all claims will be backed up with references.

This commentary takes research from the past decade to see what types of tests are best, when should teachers give them, and how many should students complete in a unit of study.

The Results:

We’ll save you some reading and break down the author’s results below:

The paper examined many other facets of tests. We recommend you click the title above to see their work for some extra reading.

In Your Classroom:

Assessments will always be part of any classroom. It may not always be a test or a quiz, but at the end of the day, part of our job as teachers is to evaluate our students against the curriculum to ensure they are ready for the next step.

For those of us with larger class sizes, especially in secondary schools, multiple choice can be the standard but also heavily, heavily, criticized.

Papers like this show that the multiple choice form is not to blame - it’s how we’ve been using it.

Strategies

For those in primary, more frequent, smaller, and simpler assessments will help prepare your students for later grades.

Junior/Intermediate/Middle-school classes, this is where you can start to introduce various test types. Multiple choice should enter here, even if it’s the standard, easy kind. Save short answers for direct evaluations and long answer questions to help students develop and organize their thoughts.

Secondary and beyond - this is where research like this suggests, depending on your learners of course, to use frequent, small stakes quizzes often throughout the unit. Do your part in ensuring students treat these as low stake - let them know their grades cannot be swayed greatly by them, but that they still count.

Slowly and surely, the anxiety should fade for most learners. Then, focus on upgrading the way you design those multiple choice questions. Each option should encourage students to recall and think about multiple different things that are related. 

There is such a thing as high level multiple choice questions. And for this, the research is clear - if we go the multiple choice route, this should be our only style of questioning.

REFERENCES

This week’s issue adapts information from the following sources:

Tech Talk:

Gimkit (2024).Gimkit. Retrieved from https://www.gimkit.com/ 

Brainy Bits:

Murphy, D.H., Little, J.L. & Bjork, E.L. The Value of Using Tests in Education as Tools for Learning—Not Just for Assessment. Educ Psychol Rev 35, 89 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09808-3