Using Google Classroom to Create Formative Assessments

07/18/2021

It has been several years since I checked out Google Classroom, and I must admit, I'm impressed! I recently used the Quiz Assignment tool to make an assessment designed to be used formatively with a group of middle school science students studying ecology, and it seems to have most of the features I need to create and administer a good assessment.

Some of the things I like about Quiz Assignment are its:

nice variety of question types (multiple choice, short and long answer, likert scale; grid, etc.);
ability for students to respond with an uploaded file (audio, video, image);
ease of embedding videos and images into questions and feedback;
automatic scoring for some question types;
automated feedback with the ability to link to websites and video;
option to allow students to take the assessment once or multiple times;
variety of assessment data available in the "responses" tab (i.e. total points distributions, frequently missed questions; responses by question and student);
ability to easily export results to a spreadsheet;
apparent ease of assignment to students (either whole group or individually).

I have not used Quiz Assignment with a group of students, so there may be downsides to the application I am not experiencing by creating sample quizzes. In my classroom teaching days, many a lesson played out perfectly in my head during planning, only to crash and burn when deployed with actual middle schoolers.

Here are a few things I wonder about using Quiz Assignment assessments with students:

I see there is an option to allow students to view the response data. Is this a useful feature? Do students actually make use of this type of information for learning?
How well does the "plagiarism checker" work? Why only 5 checks per class ($$?)?
Why only 1 response per user when importing quiz results into the grade book? Is there a way to save the results for multiple attempts (indicating progress or persistence)?
What challenges do students have with the user interface? Does anything funky happen if you try to take a quiz on a phone or older tablet?
Is there a way for users to see different questions based on their responses? Can the quiz be made somewhat responsive?

One downside I think I see (as I newbie, I may just be missing it) is the inability for students to collaborate on quizzes. For formative assessment purposes, I can imagine wanting to assign a small groups of students a few meaty questions to work on together, and then taking advantage of the auto feedback feature to provide initial support. There are certainly other ways to accomplish collaborative work in Google Classroom, but providing the option in Quiz Assignment would be nice. I would also like to see more flexibility with the placement of images. A few well-placed images and animations could go a long way towards increasing the accessibility of assessments created with English learners and others who struggle with text-based descriptions in mind (Universal Design).

Humm...Now I'm wondering what accessibility features are available in Google Classroom and the Google suite of tools. Stay tuned for a post about what I discover.

Links and Resources

This link takes you to a teacher-made Quiz Assignment tutorial

Follow these links (John S. and Alice K.) to find out why these two teachers do not recommend using Quiz Assignment for assessments.

Follow this link for a video describing my middle school ecology quiz.

The food web images in my assessments are used with permission from ONPAR .
More information about the IQWST curriculum for middle school science can be found here.
This link will take you to the relevant NGSS docs related to my assessment.