Using Kahoot to assess and evaluate teaching interventions

Kahoot and other quizzing software are powerful tools for assessment as they provide instant feedback, gameification, and the MCQ (multiple choice questions) and free typing questions can be modified to assess higher-order skills, as well as knowledge recall. In addition, the anonymity of these tools can allow evaluation of your teaching intervention.

What did you do? Why did you do it?

I had the opportunity through STEM@Leeds to plan and carry out a number of mini-lecture sessions with A-level students to introduce them to university-style teaching and an active research area. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, these sessions took place online, and so I used the opportunity to try out some different learning tools. I used Kahoot, an online quizzing software, to provide the assessment and evaluation aspects of my sessions.

I chose Kahoot as many students are already familiar with the platform and it is intuitive for those that aren’t. Additionally, it represents an effective assessment tool as it provides instant feedback to the learners, anonymity, the opportunity to compete with each other, and the MCQ format can be used to assess the higher order skills of Bloom’s taxonomy.

To assess these higher order skills I used a number of techniques informed by a training course I attended. I made the questions scenario-based so that students had to apply their knowledge as well as remember details. I also provided data for them to analyse and evaluate potential outcomes. The student response data were collected by Kahoot and so I was able to review the responses and evaluate my teaching intervention through the same software.

What was the impact of your practice and how have you evaluated it?

I was able to build my evaluation into the session by including the question “What do you think of biophysics?” with a free typing answer option in Kahoot, both before and after the mini-lectures. Prior to one of the sessions 68% of the students reported that they had not heard of biophysics, whereas following the session 94% of the students reported that they thought biophysics was an interesting area of research. I was also able to see from the results of the Kahoot quiz which topics students had struggled with and then adapt future sessions to address these areas better.

How could others benefit from this example?

MCQs have several benefits when used in assessments but are often overlooked when it comes to assessing higher order skills. Therefore, others could benefit by not only using these more but also a new teaching technology.

Author

Alexandra Holmes, bs14aomh@leeds.ac.uk, School of Biomedical Sciences

Additional Reading

Atkinson, M and Meadows, K.N. 2018. Writing Multiple-Choice Questions to Assess Higher Order Thinking.

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