Google Forms for Assessment, Evaluation, and Reflection

When I think about teaching and learning, assessment is probably the messiest area of the process for me. The longer I teach, the more I seem to struggle with feeling as though I am designing and administering assessment tools that not only measure and reflect the content and skills a student is mastering , but also capture the student’s thinking in the learning process.

One tool that I have found helpful in creating formative and summative assessments this academic school year is Google Forms, a free tool in the suite of Google Docs.  Google Forms allows you to create assessments that can be open-ended or objective in nature; you also can create survey style assessments in which learners respond to questions by ranking or rating their responses.  With Google Forms, you can create assessment questions in the format of:

• short answer text
• paragraph or multiple paragraph text
• multiple choice
• checkboxes
• a list of answer choices
• scaled responses
• a grid style response

Once you have created your assessment form, you can apply a theme from the menu of choices and then share your survey either via a URL or you can embed into into a web-based tool that accepts HTML code.  Once participants are finished with the assessment, you can easily pull your data into a Google Forms spreadsheet; you can either work with your data within the Google Docs spreadsheet application or you can download into other third-party formats, including Excel and Open Office.  You can also choose to keep this data private or to share it with selected users; for example, when I use Google Forms to engage our Media 21 students in self-assessments, I can easily share the document with Susan Lester, my collaborating teacher, by providing her a private and direct link to the Google Docs spreadsheet that is generated from the data in the form.

Check out how Jessica Hagman, Ohio University librarian, embedded this Google Form for assessment into this LibGuides page:

Here is an example of how I used Google Forms to engage our 10th grade Media 21 students in self-reflection and self-assessment on their most recent presentations:

Google Forms are not just for librarian who work with teen or adult patrons!  The Birmingham (MI) Public Schools’ elementary school librarians Julie Green (author of Super Smart Information Strategies: Write it Down) and Kristin Fontichiaro (editor of 21^st-Century Learning in School Libraries) collaborated to create a second grade fixed-schedule unit bringing together the inquiry process as described in Debbie Miller?sTeaching with Intention with age-appropriate resources about seeds, embedded in a wiki.  After their multimedia explorations, students reflected on what they had learned about research and what they had learned about the content area. Google Forms made it easy to integrate the reflective assignment into the wiki space, and the results, gathered behind the scenes in a single spreadsheet, facilitated quick analysis of student responses.

You can see a snippet of their data form that Google Forms pulls into the Google Docs spreadsheet below:

Not only can you use Google Forms for assessing student learning, but you can also utilize Google Forms as a pre-workshop or pre-training tool to assess participants’ prior knowledge, and consequently, incorporate that information into your instructional design.   Polly Farrington recently used this Google Form to administer a pre-assesment to her Tech Camp participants:

In addition, you can use Google Forms to assess participants’ evaluation of your teaching and workshop/training session to improve and craft your practice as a trainer or instructor:

This video, while not geared for a library setting, is a quick and helpful overview of the process of creating and publishing a Google Form for assessment:

Google Forms makes it easy to collect and share qualtiative and quantitative data for evaluating student learning as well as library instruction.  If you are using Google Forms as a means of assessment in your library program, how are you incorporating this evaluation tool?  Please share your best practices here in the comments section of this post.

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Buffy Hamilton