First, I'll start with some of the rationale behind using adaptive assessments. Traditionally, we have all used linear, fixed form assessments--everyone gets the same questions in the same order. The scores that students get don't always reflect the true level of students' understanding. Some students may be able to answer questions at a high level but could make silly mistakes on the lower level questions. Others may be able to answer the questions at a lower level, but miss the more rigorous questions. When you make an adaptive assessment, you can set it up so that the questions students get change depending on their answer to the previous question. You can also embed remediation into the assessment itself and give instant feedback on answers as correct or incorrect. This could be a really powerful tool once you get the hang of it!
There are a lot of limitations when you are trying to create an adaptive assessment in Google Forms. If you are going to create one, you need to try to start small! It becomes really cumbersome if you have a lot of questions. Depending on how many directions you take each question, it can become really complicated really quickly. You will potentially be writing many more questions than students will actually see. This process is best for short formative assessments, as opposed to a longer summative. Plus, there is no way to remove the "back" button, so students could figure out that they are able to re-try a question. If you are making an adaptive assessment in Google Forms, it needs to be multiple choice, which limits the way you can ask questions. To overcome the fact that students can get a multiple choice question correct by guessing, you could ask a follow up--how confident are you about your answer? Or add a text box in which you ask them to explain their thinking. Be aware that your spreadsheet data that Forms produces will look quite a bit different than what you would normally get. Not all students will answer all questions. Data interpretation may be a little tricky.
When setting up an adaptive assessment, you can have various places for questions to go, depending on your goal for the assessment. Ideally, the assessment responds to individual students' abilities. For instance, if a student gets a question correct, you could have them try a more difficult question next. If they get it wrong, you could send them to an easier question or to some type of support. Some of the suggestions our facilitator had for landing from an incorrect answer are videos, notes, weblinks. You could send a student to a text box to explain their thinking whether they got a question right or wrong. You could set up the next page to tell them if their answer is right or wrong so that the students get instant feedback. The assessment doesn't even need to adapt to their answers--you could have the same set of questions for everyone but simply have their next question on a page that tells them whether or not their answer was correct. It sounds really complicated until you actually try it. And it is complicated, but once you start to play around with it, what you can do with it will make a lot more sense!
Before you start trying to create your adaptive assessment, you want to create a map. Sketch out how the questions will flow and where different answers will take students. In order to make an adaptive assessment, you will need to make sure you put each question on a different page (add a Page Break between each question). For the question, click "Go to page based on answer." When I was creating my assessment, I changed the page title to tell me something about what question was on that page. This helped tremendously because when you choose the page to go to after a particular question, they are listed by their titles and it's a lot easier to find that next question. Do not require any of the questions (except ones that you know every student will see) or they will not be able to submit their completed form.
When you are mapping out your questions (and also when entering), I suggest working with the all "correct" track first to keep things simple. That would allow you to work with a simple linear test at the beginning, and then go back to add in other directions. A fellow teacher asked about a way to set it up if you want them to try all of the questions, and if they get any of them wrong, they still see the same next question BUT you want them to get remediation at the end if they missed any of the questions. Our facilitator suggested setting up a duplicate of your "correct track." Then students could be diverted to this duplicate set of questions once they miss any of the questions. See a map of what this may look like below.
Another idea our facilitator suggested as an application, for a case in which you want to collect data on students and the data you are collecting may be slightly different. On the first page, a student could select their name (or you could select) and then there would be a different set of questions for each student. He suggested this could be used to collect data on behavior.
Here are a couple of tips for Google Forms that will be helpful for creating these assessments and in general that I learned during this workshop:
- you can embed a Youtube video in a Form
- if you are creating the Form logged into your organization, you can require students to be signed into their official account BUT if you want students to access from their devices, you may want to unclick and just have them enter their name on the first page
- you can zoom out on your browser to see a lot of your pages (or questions) within forms at once--this will help you from getting lost when making an adaptive assessment
- copy the form and rename the copy to give to a new class to keep data separate
A kind of side note here... this really reminds me of the Choose Your Own Adventure type books that I used to read as a kid! There are websites that can be used to create that type of thing. I wonder whether any of these tools would be useful for creating an adaptive assessment. I am going to have to look into this further. For now, here is a link of one that I found with a quick Google search: Create your own Choose Your Own Adventures!
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