Adaptive assessments

Making adaptive assessments using Google Forms takes some getting used to.  You will basically be manipulating the Forms environment to do something it is capable of, but not set up naturally to do.  I imagine one day someone will write a script to do this in a more automated way, but for now we have to work within the constraints we have in Forms.

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!

Engagement for all

This workshop on engagement was very focused on cooperative learning, so there was a lot of review, but there were some new ideas that were presented.  I am basically going to dump it all here in the form of a list

• using colored table markers or some other identifier, like content-specific pictures (especially good to use so you aren't numbering the tables and seats, which could get confusing)
• facilitator referred to time that a student has to speak as "airtime" (I thought this was cute!)
• when a student runs out of things to say in their allotted time tell students they should sit in the silence, feel the silence--so they don't just jump in and rescue each other (this would be good to employ at certain times, other times focus may be on training students to ask productive questions)
• when doing an activity where personal sharing time is not structured, remind students to make sure to involve everyone--if you notice someone that is not participating, ask them questions
• hogs vs logs (those who dominate vs those who don't participate in a group)
• using any of the following as an eraser for dry erase boards: fabric glove that you would use to wash a car, swiffer pads cut up, felt (what I use), an old sock, pom poms glued to markers
• tell students to work on making sure that every voice is being heard and no voice is dominating the conversation
• let students know that these are skills they should be using out in the real world (even if they are in kindergarten and the "real world" is just recess)
• roller coaster high five (make a roller coaster motion with your hands before high fiving)
• make sure that learning is collaborative and not competitive (don't pit one table against another)
• some students need a "personal invitation" to get started on a task (I really liked this phrase)
• in the PIES for cooperative learning (see below), when you are trying to ensure individual accountability, do not give group grades

• a whip around (every students gives an answer) is good when you want to reinforce something important--students will likely hear similar answers multiple times
• when doing a card sort, assign cards to each student so that each student only touches their own cards
• a fellow teacher reminded me about what I used to do for grouping--use card suits (you will end up with four students in each group--one for each suit--and you can pull as many cards as you have groups)
• for fan-n-pick, have a set of generic cards labeled 1-10 (or whatever) so you don't have to make the cards every time--then project the questions on the board, numbered 
• when doing inside outside circle, give more specific instructions:  first evens make a circle, then odds stand behind an even
• have students high five someone as they go past in inside-outside circle
• say "thank you for the 80% that responded, now we need 100%"  (I liked this because a lot of times whatever I say to the class makes some kids feel like I didn't recognize that they participated)
• "if you want to make a gain, it's going to be painful" (we were talking about this a lot in terms of kids who have trouble talking in front of other people)
• we did the final word protocol (first saw this in collaborative problem solving) but in this version, the first person only says a quote from an article we read and does not comment on it until everyone else has and then they get the final word (doesn't influence others' thinking as much)
• we used the following indicators when reading:  !=new thinking, ?=something you question or want to ask about, *=agree, x=disagree
• have each student use a different colored pen or highlighter to see their contribution to the work
• we read an article about levels of engagement and this schematic below was the most useful--notice the pie charts at the bottom (in particular, the highly engaged classroom does not have 100% engagement because it is really unrealistic)  our facilitators mentioned showing this to the evaluating administrators which is definitely a good idea

• two new silly games!  
• baby blob--one person is the baby blob, when they tag someone, they link arms...blob grows as they continue to tag people and add (warning, we knocked a ton of drinks over playing this game!)
• rock paper scissors cheer--rock paper scissors in groups of two, winning person finds another person to play against while losers become cheering squad (will end up with final two people and everyone else cheering!)
• silly games are supported  by the Mindsets in the Classroom (by Mary Ricci)--gets blood/oxygen to the brain and promotes mental strength and alertness
• facilitators had us write a goal for the year that they will email to us at the start of the semester (I have seen this in another workshop before and think it is great idea--note to self if I ever facilitate a workshop)

A few ideas that popped into my head during the workshop...

• family feud affirmation--"good answer, good answer"
• have students fill out a "what was my contribution?" questionnaire with a group project and grade just that part for them (for individual accountability)
• create a generic card that has a place to write a role for each group member (for example, when using fan-n-pick).  Have students write in the roles so you don't have to print a separate mat every time you want to do an activity where students have rotating roles.  We talked about using dry erase or post-its to re-use it.
• my teammates and I came up with the acronym RINGS to represent engagement:
• R=Respect/Risk/Relevance
• I=Involvement/Interdependence
• N=No hiding
• G=Group interaction