Hello fellow analyst,
Welcome to my new blog post, all about my experience creating a student assessment using Google Forms. In this unit, the ISTE standards collectively emphasize the need for teachers, coaches, and educational leaders to utilize data and integrate technology to empower other educators and learners. The 2022 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition connects with the ISTE standards because the panelists discuss current and future trends in analytics for education (Pelletier et al., 2022). They discuss the importance of school data to support student outcomes. Unfortunately, there are challenges and risks inherent in higher institutional school systems that impede the successful utilization of technology to analyze student data (Pelletier et al., 2022, p.17). This can also be applied to K-12 institutions. For example, most higher institutions use data silos, or data collection systems that are independent of other systems or software within a network (Pelletier et al., 2022, p.17). This fragmented system of data collection and retrieval process also serves to fragment the culture of the school by alienating access to important data from other department members. Thus, schools should strive to provide their educators or designated staff members advanced and equally assessable data collection and retrieval software systems that all members can utilize to support student outcomes.
Despite the fact that data analytics is still an area that needs to be perfected amongst institutions, there are many ways that educators can maintain their own student records for ease of access and efficient data analysis. Indeed, this is a part of a teachers' professional responsibility. For that reason, in this unit I delve into a powerful assessment tool known as Google Forms. If you recall, I chose Google Sites and Blogger to document my learning journey, so I decided to continue this trend and stick with Google. Additionally, I have had prior experience using Google Forms, and each time its implementation has been successful amongst my students.
In my opinion, Google Forms is very simple and straightforward to use, and it takes no prior experience to get started with it. In order to access Google Forms, you must log in to Google. Once you log in, on the main dashboard you receive an option to open up a blank form or choose from a variety of templates, depending on the purpose of your form. What I thought was particularly neat about this option is that it has an education section with a variety of education templates to choose from. For this project, I chose the "assessment" template. However, they also had an exit ticket, worksheet, and course evaluation choice template to choose from. Once I opened my template, I loved the initial format of the assessment. Google Forms provides a variety of question format options such as checkboxes, multiple choice, dropdown, short answer, and paragraph questions. My favorite question types have got to be the short answer and paragraph question formats because they are relevant to social studies education.
As a Social Studies educator, and to align this work with a lesson that I am working on for my Models of Teaching class this semester, I decided that my assessment would be on the TEKS that I am going to be teaching in a few weeks. The lesson is on Spanish exploration. The assessment measures students' understanding of important figures that took part in the early exploration of Texas and the New World such as Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and famous conquistador Hernan Cortes. In my assessment, I included a combination of question types such as checkboxes, multiple choice, and paragraph question types. I chose the paragraph question type for the end of my assessment because it is part of social studies standards for students; particularly in the area of research and analysis. As part of their education, social studies students should engage with primary and secondary sources and critically respond to them. Using this question type I was able to include a primary source excerpt to promote students' analytical skills. Also, to make my assessment more appealing I included images relevant to each question. After completing my assessment, I shared it with a couple of my peers and was able to get instant analytics on their responses. Google Forms allows you to collect the names and email addresses of your participants. Additionally you are able to see individual answer choices and grade your assessments. However, the best part about Google Forms is that it will automatically create a Google Sheets (spreadsheet) to document your data if you choose so, for more efficient analysis.
Overall, the creation of my Google Forms assessment was very simple! I see myself continuing to use Google Forms as my assessment platform of choice. It is very simple to create an assessment or even a questionnaire to assess students and keep track of their progress. Most of the time educators are occupied with many duties, but having a simple yet efficient platform to assess and evaluate the learning of students such as Google Forms, is a great technological tool to have.
Check out my Google Forms and see for yourself. While you're at it, test your knowledge of Texas History!
Happy analytics,
Ana
Resources:
Pelletier, K., McCormack, M., Reeves,
J., Robert, J., Arbino, N., Al-Freih, M.,Dickson-Deane, C., Guevara, C.,
Koster, L., Sánchez-Mendiola, M., Bessette,L.S., and Stine, J.,
(2022). 2022 Educause horizon report, teaching and learning edition. EDUCAUSE.
https://library.educause.edu/resources/2022/4/2022-educause-horizon-report-teaching-and-learning-edition
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