Google Forms: What Does the Data Tell Us?

With the use of technology, now there are new ways teachers can create tests and quizzes that they can use to assess their students' learning.

One form of technology that can be used to create assessments is Google Forms, which is found on the Google Drive and Google Documents site. I had a chance to have fun with creating my very own quiz, to which I definitely did! I decided to create a formative assessment based on Egyptian Mythology. I have always been very interested in the Egyptian culture, and so I thought it would be fun to create a quiz over different Egyptian gods and symbols. I linked the quiz here if you would like to try your luck:

Through this process, I found it actually very fun to play with all of the tools that Google Forms has to offer. You could create multiple choice, multiple answer, and short response questions. You could even add a video to your quiz and have the students watch it to get the answer for the question on the quiz! I enjoyed picking the background, creating different types of questions, and adding images to my quiz. It was very interesting to see the process of making a quiz that I could use in the future in my very own classroom.

Then, I had my peers try out my quiz and submit their answers to me. I ended up getting fourteen responses in total. Once I got all of the responses, I collected my data. How did I do that? Well, Google Forms did it for me! The site can create its very own spreadsheet for the quiz I made. With that information, the spreadsheet (which is shown below) can be used to create graphs and charts of the data. This is so crucial, because it allows you as a teacher to interpret the data and analyze where each student is at in their understanding of concepts you tested them on. It allows you to see in a very visual way where you can move to and what you need to touch up on. This makes it easy to see what you can also improve on in your teaching.

From my quiz, I saw that many of the students scored pretty high, in around the region of 8+ points. Four of my peers got 10 points out of the 14, while three students got 8 points out of the 14. The rest got 6 points and below, besides the one student who got a perfect score of 14. There was even one student who got zero points. Overall, there was many different scores that my peers had gotten. If I had seen this in the classroom, I would think that I needed to go over some things that the students did not understand.

The graphs I created from the spreadsheets shows specific questions from the quiz that I created. What Google Sheet graph shows is that about 60% got the correct answer for question number 2. It is over 50%, which is good for this question. However, my goal is to make sure that 80% of students can get the correct answer on this question, as well as all of the other questions on this quiz. It shows me that I want to take steps to help the students who are still struggling and confused, while also moving on for the kids that already get it.

What Google Sheets doesn't show me, however, is data for short responses. I got no data for number 3, which was the question "What are Egyptian Hieroglyphs?". I made sure to have many answers to this question, and I input a bunch of different ways my peers could respond. However, Google Forms does not count it write if things are spelt incorrectly or if it is a slightly different wording. So, many students got this wrong. This, in turn, messed up my data. So, I think Google Forms and Google Sheets is hard to use when it comes to short responses.

Something I can fix, however, is the way I word problems. In the future, I now know that I need to word my questions more clearly. For this question, I asked “Which two gods were married?” (shown in the graph below). I forgot to put that two answers needed to be selected. I needed to add that for the directions on that problem to "Checkmark two answers". I did not do that, however. So, there are answers on this that have only one answer that was selected by the quiz taker. So, I would make sure to do that the next time I make a google form.

Overall, I learned how amazing technology has changed the world of education and how it can assist teachers in ways that they assess their students. I definitely will use Google Forms in the future as a teacher, because this site is a great tool for creating fun formative and summative assessments. I am excited to explore more about Google Forms and other technology methods I can use in the future.