Socrative: The New Way to Talk About Data

As a math teacher, I think about data quite often. The internet provides us with so much data about so many things, that I feel it’s important for students, and teachers, to be able to collect, organize and analyze data. Every time I teach a Statistics unit in my math classes, I explain to students that knowing how to analyze different types of data is way more useful than learning calculus.

I keep endless amounts of data on the students — exams, performance tasks, historical comments. It is my belief that data can connect me to my students and how they learn. Most importantly, it helps me to reflect on my teaching practices.

I realized quickly that looking at exam scores at the end of a unit wasn’t helpful for myself or my students. I have always incorporated formative assessments into my lesson, however, I wanted a way to gather formative data and analyze individual students and class trends. That way, I can conjure up conversations with students and provide them evidence with the standard they have not quite mastered. This is where Socrative, an online quiz platform and mastery tracker comes into play. It allows students to engage in fun and interactive quizzes while tracking their data for me to analyze.

 

 

Why I like Socrative:

• Socrative is easy to use. It’s intuitive.
• It allows for multiple choice, short answer, and true or false questions, all gradable
• There is an option to upload images to questions (great for multiple content areas)
• Quizzes can be saved and shared with other teachers
• All reports and data is housed and is available by email, drive or by download. You can access full class and individual student data this way.
• Teachers can see in real time what/how students are answering specific questions

How to Use Socrative:

After creating a teacher account, you will be assigned a room number, and you can being creating quizzes and formative assessments.

I like to make a quiz assessing students on what they have learned the previous class (I call them entrance tickets). Students sit down, take out their computers and log in. I will have already set up the quiz on my computer.

There are different options for types of quizzes depending on the needs of the formative, you can choose the style of quiz. I like the student paced – immediate feedback when I have students complete an entrance ticket. When I am having student practice a new skill during class, the space race is a great way to get high engagement and useful data on students and their levels of mastery. The exit ticket is a great, quick tool to get a picture of how your class mastered a standard/topic taught. And, they get to use their phones or computers, so it’s fun for them!

Making Use of the Reports:

For me, the best part of using Socrative is the reporting section. For each class and quiz taken, I save the reports to my Drive. I can use excel and make graphs with the data, see trends in specific questions, assess my teaching and their learning. 

Ever further, I can share the individual student reports with the respective students. The data is now in their hands. They are able to look through their pdf and see which questions they got wrong and identify their strengths and weaknesses within a standard or topic. That way, they can work towards mastery on specific questions. The students also have an idea of how they stand in regards to the unit assessment. Essentially, it puts the ownership of learning back into their hands.

I would highly recommend Socrative as  formative tool for many grade levels and certainly many different content areas. A goal for myself in the future is to start having students keep track of their scores and formatives in a data folder, so there is a visual element that will help them reach their goals throughout a lesson.

How do you use data in your classroom? Any tips, suggestions, strategies that have worked?