Socrative

What is Socrative?

This article summarise some of the buzz words surrounding formative assessment and considers how Socrative, an intelligent Student response system, can be used to enhance Student learning experiences, reduce teacher workload and provide a whole new approach for checking for understanding in the digital classroom. 

With Socrative, the process of capturing student response is quick and easy. The system eliminates manual data entry and delivers accurate results in real-time with visual representations that make it easy to track student progress and assess their understanding. Students can respond using devices or paper questionnaires, and teachers can quickly get valuable insight about what students are thinking, where help is needed, and which concepts have been mastered.

Teachers can easily get the data they need to quickly assess student understanding and progress by using Socrative's teacher dashboard. The dashboard displays visual representations of statistical data in real-time, making it easy for teachers to track student progress and identify areas where more instruction or support is needed.

On the dashboard, teachers are provided with instant feedback on the performance of each student so they can make timely adjustments to lesson plans as needed.

Before we dive into the details of Socrative and the functionality, it's worth revisiting some of the principles of formative assessment.

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Getting to Grips with Socrative's Features

Socrative offers a plethora of features that facilitate engaging, collaborative learning experiences in the classroom. One of the basic features is the ability to create a choice quiz, where teachers can present multiple-choice, true or false, or short answer questions.

With open-ended questions feature, educators can dive deeper into students' understanding and creativity. In addition, teachers can also initiate quick question polls or on-the-fly questioning to assess understanding in real-time, thereby identifying learning gaps promptly.

For a more dynamic classroom experience, Socrative offers a class-wide quiz option, encouraging healthy competition and fostering effective engagement. To support the adaptive learning approach, the system allows educators to edit quizzes or convert them into individual quizzes depending on the learners' needs.

Moreover, Socrative offers shareable links to the quizzes, which makes it easier for teachers to distribute assessments and for students to participate. This classroom app serves as a versatile tool for real-time formative assessments through quizzes, ultimately enabling an engaging, interactive, and inclusive learning environment.

What do we mean by formative assessment? 

Whenever people talk about formative assessment, it may take them back to the days of teacher training, when it was very clear that there was a distinction between assessment for learning, assessment of learning and assessment as learning.

Similarly, some people might have been trained with the terms of diagnostic, formative, benchmark and summative assessment. The purpose? To understand if we, as practitioners, know how our students are getting on with the knowledge we are teaching them. 

There is, of course, no problem with using any of these terms, within the classroom environment, today. However, what has been used, increasingly over the last 10 years, is a reference to the idea of checking for understanding.

For many, this may not seem to do similar to the assessments -of, -for, or -as, learning that many would have previously been trained to use. 

What does Dylan William say about Assessment for Learning?

However, what is different is the bedrock of educational research that backs-up why checking for understanding is important. When I was training, I still remember a story that I was told, which came from Dylan Williams.

Inititally, he explained the story when he was delivering a lecture at the Institute of Education, at the University of London (albeit, I wasn’t at the lecture, but, heard the story after). Within his talk, he explains the idea of using assessment to improve learning. Within this talk he establishes why this is important, what this might look like in the classroom and how practitioners could be doing this in a classroom.

The story that stays with me, still in my practice today, from Dylan Williams, is surrounding the idea of a plane.

How is checking for student understanding like a plane journey?

In brief summary, and I am not putting this as well as Dylan William himself says, but, he asks you to imagine a pilot of a plane. Within the story, he asks the question of how successful the flight would've been if, as William suggests, a pilot navigates as some teachers assess.

William suggests that a pilot should always be checking their navigational equipment and instruments to ensure they are on track to their destination. In similar way, Williams suggests that, even though curriculum time is tight, teachers must always use their instruments to make sure that their students are on track to their destination. Of course, for teachers, their instruments are vast and their destination is students making progress over time.

So, regardless of what phrases you were trained to use, regardless of what phrases you use in your school currently, there is a commonality here. That commonality is the idea of checking for understanding.

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What is checking for student understanding? 

Research suggests that regular checking for understanding ensures that you, as the practitioner, know where each student is, in terms of their knowledge and understanding, throughout the lesson. Simply, if a student doesn't ‘get it’, stop, re-teach, and check for understanding again.

Sadly, if we as practitioners, are not doing this, our students may be missing out on core knowledge that will enable them to access learning, later on. 

What does Rosenshine say? 

Many of us will know of Barak Rosenshine, and his Principles of Instruction. One of those, with reference to checking for understanding, is the idea of an 80% success rate. This success rate, then, allows teachers to know if students are on track and understanding the knowledge they have been given. The aim, for all students, is to achieve at 80% success rate with what they are doing.

Like before, if that 80% success rate is not achieved, stop, re-teach, and check for understanding again. However, although this is useful for a teacher understanding where the students ‘get it’ or not, this is also useful in allowing the teacher to know, for those students who are getting above and beyond the 80% success rate, whether tasks need to be changed and adapted to suit their needs, too.

So, the idea of an 80% success rate, does not only allow the teacher to understand where there might be gaps in knowledge. But, it also allows the teacher to constantly be adapting their teaching to ensure that all learners are achieving and accessing the correct level of mastery in the lessons. 

Doug Lemov on Checking for Student Understanding

Similarly, within his book, teach like champion, Doug Lemov explains how the check for understanding strategy is effective in the classroom.

He suggests that this is categorised into two sections: the gathering of data and the responding to data. Simply, gathering the data, Lemov suggests, is when the teacher asks a range of questions to the students, to gain an idea of their understanding.

Secondly, the idea of responding to the data is what the teacher does once they have got the data. For example, this might be re-teaching, challenging, going over specific parts of knowledge, or going over a technique or skill again. 

There are a variety of ways that colleagues can check for understanding in the classroom. Whether this be quick questions, exit tickets, targeted questioning, whereby teacher has a range of pre-written questions specific to students within that lesson. 

The use of mini whiteboards, which are a useful and efficient way of gathering knowledge, real-time, from the whole class in a time effective way. This might be a range of questions and answers the teachers are students and they write down in their exercise books or learning booklets.

It could be a teacher setting a task, based on odyssey, and the teacher then observing the students responses to that task. There are also a range of digital tools such as free quizzing software and applications that teachers can use, either as a whole class, or, on individual, one-to-one devices. 

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Using digital technology to improve student learning

If any of you have read one of my previous articles on technology-enhanced learning, you may recall a reference to the EEF report on using digital technology to improve learning. Once of the recommendations of the report is that technology can play a role in improving assessment and feedback. 

Whereas the EEF recognises that technology improves assessment and feedback, they note that ‘how teachers use information from assessments, and how pupils act on feedback, matter more than the way in which it is collected and delivered’ (EEF, 2021). Therefore, it is not only about how teachers gain the data, but, more importantly, how teachers efficiently use this data in their classrooms. 

Secondly, the EEF mention that technology can ‘increase the accuracy of assessment, and the speed with which assessment information is collected’ (EEF, 2021). Therefore, colleagues, if using the correct digital assessment tools, will be able to spend more time on acting upon feedback, rather than collecting and marking this beforehand. 

Thirdly, the EEF suggest that technology can ‘can be used to provide feedback directly to pupils’ (EEF, 2021). Therefore, using digital quizzing platforms, teachers can not only effecictly set quizzes for Students to complete, but also set automatic feedback to Students, so, they can gain quick and efficient feedback to know what they need to do to get even better and gain levels of mastery.

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How can Socrative be used for formative assessment?

Socrative is a free*, cloud-based Student response system, part of Showbie, who specialise in assessment and feedback. So, when I first heard of the idea of Socrative, knowing it came from Showbie, I hoped this would be encouraging. (*depending on account). 

Similar to something like Google Foms or Microsoft Forms, Socrative allows teachers to create quizzes and assessments, within a range of parameters. For example, multiple choice, true or false and short answer questions. In addition, there is a range of pre-made Socrative assessments on the website itself. So, to reduce teacher workload, as well as promoting collaboration across colleagues, this is a good tool to have. Think of it as an intelligent Student response system. 

I have seen this work very well within trust, where checking for understanding within their curriculum is purely assessed using Socrative. One central team, or a group of Lead Teachers create the assessments for every teacher, and all individual teachers need to do is import the quiz to their Socrative account to use it with the classes.

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How is Socrative different to other quizzing platforms?

With Socrative, student users don't login with a single sign on (SSO) or their username and password. Instead, they login with a room name. You can have a range of these, based on your level of account. Once you launch a quiz in Socrative, you launch with a specific room name. You can have a variety of these, depending on the level of account you have.

Once the student has entered the room name, they are asked to enter their name and the quiz can launch.

One very useful feature of using Socrative, opposed to other quizzing platforms, is the live results dashboard. Say, for example, you have a class of 30 students all logged into your Socrative room. They are completing a quiz towards the end of the lesson to allow you, as a teacher, to understand if you need to reach any knowledge before the next lesson. You, as the teacher, are able to see, live, how each student is performing, in response to every question. This provides real time insight. 

The usefulness of Socrative does not stop here, though. When quizzes are finished, the teacher can go to the report section on Socrative to view class reports in a variety of ways. For example a whole class spreadsheets, outlines each question and how each student performed. Individual student PDFs allow teachers to download a summary of how an individual student has performed for each question. 

Question specific PDFs allow teachers, on a macro level, to see how the whole class has performed in response to each question. This provides a question level analysis. 

These are not only useful tools, but, also give the teacher the ability to drill down into how students are progressing over time. I believe, this gives a real opportunity for checking for understanding, in a much more efficient and comprehensive way than other forms of quizzing platforms. 

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What else can Socrative do? 

The quizzing features are very useful, and I believe go beyond the generic monitoring features of some other well-known cuisine platforms. 

However, Socrative also allows you to complete ad-hoc assessment. This is especially useful if you have one-to-one devices, such as iPads within the classroom. 

If students are logged into the Socrative room, then, from your teacher Socrative dashboard, you can quickly launch things, such as quick, multiple-choice, true or false and short answer questions. This allows teachers, at a touch of a button, to gain on-the-fly, valuable data, to check for understanding, within a class. 

Quizzes within Socrative can also be set as a space race. This provides competition among Students. 

This is an interactive, engaging, and competitive way of setting quizzes. This can be anonymized, for example by colour, each student will know their colour, and, as they progress through the quiz, the colour of rocket progresses along the space race. This is an anonymous, yet engaging way of checking for understanding.

I have found that these are particularly useful when used at the end of a topic before moving onto another one. These were also particularly useful during the school closures during the coronavirus pandemic. 

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Using Socrative in your classroom

Give it a go. Create a free account, get used to using the Secretive tools and then begin to use this with your classes. This works particularly well with classes that have one-to-one devices, such as iPads. 

When using digital technology, ensure that you follow the EEFs’ (2021) recommendations: 

1. Remember: ‘how teachers use information from assessments, and how pupils act on feedback, matter more than the way in which it is collected and delivered’ 
2. The use of digital technology to inform feedback and assessment should ‘inform teachers’ decision-making and reduce workload’ 
3. Remember: ‘Technology can be used to provide feedback directly to pupils’ and that ‘Feedback via technology is likely to be most beneficial if it supplements, but is aligned to, other forms of feedback’ 

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