Test Reflection using Socrative

This semester, I'm not actually teaching a class of my own, but instead I am working on assessment for four different courses (covering 6 individual classes). So in the spirit of assessment and having meaningful follow ups, I put together a Socrative (socrative.com)Quiz that could be used in class. The Quiz is available for other teachers to use by searching for the SOC# SOC-844762 in the teacher control panel. This particular quiz would be suitable for a Reading/Writing class, but could easily be modified.

 Here's what it looks like from the student side (mobile phone browser):


The first row of pictures show questions that are ways of ensuring students understand the whole-class score reports distributed as part of the test review activity.  The next few questions have the student focus on their own results and devise a strategy for improvement.  The final question deals with test fairness (face validity), giving students a chance to voice any concerns they had about the test.

The really handy part of this activity, from a teacher's standpoint, comes after the results are in... Socrative generates a nice Excel spreadsheet for you:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AiV5S7bwDyy0dHlxa0pPc3NQRE1fbGpzaUtjNHJWWlE&output=html

This saves a lot of back-end work of sorting through stacks of paper, illegible handwriting, and tabulation.  Ideally this speeds things up when it comes to acting on student reflections- you can see what most students want to do in order to improve their performance before the next class, and you can also quickly get a consensus on fairness/test issues before your next assessment meeting.  And given how easy it is to create the quiz, and for students to access it, I would argue that Socrative has a clear efficiency advantage compared to pencil and paper versions of the same activity.  It also might allow more privacy for students; no one else in the class can peep their paper, which is important because a student's grades are quite personal and might be a sensitive subject, especially for struggling students.