Professional Documents
Culture Documents
recently learned of the work of Dr. Jane McGonigal who has found that games can
go beyond entertainment and positively affect people. I would have also found as
many ways I could to present each question in a different variation to make my
game-style assessment a more effective diagnostic assessment. For example, I
would have included at least one True/False question, I would have also offered a
sorting option where students would have to put the answer choices in the correct
order. Lastly, I would have worked to find some way of including a gameified
manner for the students to answer some open-ended question.
This artifact had an impact upon professional development. More specifically, my
findings in the creation and utilization of this artifact had a lasting impact upon me.
I realized how quizzes should be varied in the question types offered and that they
also needed to be of the same level of rigor demonstrated in class. This impact
could be assessed by the shift in my approach in what format to use for
assessments for my students. I made sure to offer game-style assessments as
formative assessments or as checks for understanding. I then used those results to
determine my lessons that followed. Since the students did not take a game style
assessment as seriously as they did a more traditional one, I thereby limited my
use of digital tools for formative assessments to iRespond, Socrative, or Google
Forms as those methods helped me recreate a testing environment that was
engaging but not distracting to the students. As for my colleagues, I made sure to
casually discuss my initial hypothesis and assessment strategies with them. I
would hope that our resulting conversations encouraged others to find unique ways
for assessing students. The impact of such encouragement could be assessed in
casually seeing teachers willingness to vary their multiple choice questions. That
said, this artifact provides little in how its resulting effect could thereby be
assessed. I can say with confidence that in the continued meetings I have had with
teachers beyond the school at which I worked, that my colleagues use Kahoot! for
recording general data and do not use it to record data as a fixed measure of
student progress nor do they issue grades based upon the results.