33 Using GoFormative to Streamline Teaching

A significant aspect of the K-12 Saskatchewan curriculum is formative assessment; seeing how students are learning and responding to the course materials and making adaptations accordingly. GoFormative streamlines this process, allowing educators to properly see exactly what assignments students struggled or excelled at. For example, if GoFormative shows that 22 students in a class of 30 did poorly on a quiz about differential equations, the teacher must allot more time to this subject to ensure proper understanding and success. They may also wish to look for other ways to present this subject to students.

AR A10.1

Establish and apply criteria to evaluate own and others’ work.

AR B30.2

Reflect on and assess understanding of self as a self-directed, self-appraising, and strategic learner.

Each of these outcomes are directly related to the students’ own assessment of their own personal work, which is assessment as learning. However, using programs such as GoFormative, educators may be able to help students identify areas that they are excelling or struggling in, laying the foundation for future personal assessment and self-directed learning.

Constraints of GoFormative:

• GoFormative offers a resource that can mark students’ assignments for the teachers. While this may seem convenient, AI can still be inaccurate at times and may mark an answer as incorrect when it is not. If teachers choose to use this resource, they should still ensure that they are checking every mark that Gradescope gives to an assignment and reviewing its marking process.
  • o If GoFormative happens to mark something incorrectly and provided feedback to the student, the student may believe that they are doing something wrong when that may not be the case. This can lead to discouragement and frustration.
• Its AI programs are still in the beta stages, meaning they are relatively new and still being tested. This may lead to problems.
• Gradescope may be inaccessible to students who do not have the proper equipment to access this resource at home, such an internet connection or a device that can connect to the internet. Therefore, if teachers use this resource, they must give students time to access it during school hours.

Affordances of Gradescope:

• Offers teachers insight into individual students’ performances by gathering all of their work together and highlighting areas of strength and struggle. This can be especially useful for formative assessment.
• Can be very useful in large classrooms.
• Streamlines the grading process and saves teachers much time.
• Streamlines the process of making quizzes and exams.
• Students can also access GoFormative if given an invite link, which will allow them to access their work online at any time if they have a working device with an internet connection. This application also gives immediate feedback, showing students how well they performed on an assignment.

The Process

For context, I will be presenting how to use GoFormative to make a quiz (with an answer key) in mere minutes.

Step 1: Accessing GoFormative

• Begin by accessing the GoFormative website at https://www.formative.com/.
  • In the right corner, click the “Sign up” button.
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• Step 2: Identify Yourself
  • After completing step 1, you will then be taken to a screen asking if you are a student or a teacher. For this assignment, I clicked the “teacher” option. Afterwards, enter your email address and password. Once this is complete, you will be asked if you work in a school. Click either “I do” or “I do not.”
  • You will be taken to this screen.
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• Step 3: Activate the AI Functions
  • Click “My Account” on the left side of the screen, and then click “settings.” From there, scroll down to the “Beta” sub header and opt into each AI option by clicking the adjacent toggles. Do the same to the toggles under the “Early Access” sub header. Be sure to click “save.”
  • 
• Step 4: Begin Creating Your Quiz
  • Return to your home screen and select the header named “Formatives” on the left side of the screen, then move over to the right side of the screen and select “add.”
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• Step 5: Create Your Quiz
  • Click “Auto-Generate Formative” and a window will pop up prompting you to add information about a quiz for a specific subject and grade level. You may choose any subject or grade level you prefer. For mine, I created a tenth-grade quiz about Shakespeare. You may also click the “more options” button to change the difficulty, length, and question types (multiple choice, short answer, etc.) of the quiz.
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• Step 6: Preview and Edit Your Quiz
  • From there, click “Generate Formative” and GoFormative will use AI to generate a quiz pertaining to Shakespeare at the tenth-grade level. The quiz presents questions and answers (that will be hidden from students). You can then go to the top right corner and click either “preview” to preview the quiz, “assign” to assign this quiz to a specific class, or “present” to turn this quiz into a presentation. You can also make changes to the quiz as needed.
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Prompt Engineering

• To get the best results, be accurate. My prompt (“Shakespeare) was quite vague, and intentionally so. If I were to have asked the AI to write a quiz about “Macbeth” Act 3, it would have been more concise and relevant to course material.

Recommendations

• GoFormative’s AI only creates one answer to the questions, so teachers should attempt to include numerous answers to ensure that students do not get marked as incorrect when it is actually correct (for example, a student may forget to capitalize the L in “Lady Macbeth” and thus be marked as incorrect).

Informative presentation

 

Learn more about How to Use Go Formative by clicking the image above.