Socrative is a platform for simple and intuitive creation of quizzes. The platform is free for the creation of quizzes with up to 50 respondents. To allow up to 150 respondents, there is an annual license that needs to be purchased for around 90 euros.

Characteristics

• These quizzes are very versatile. The platform allows for 3 types of questions to be made: multiple-choice, true/false and small text input. The student’s answers are auto-corrected, being possible to notify each student about the result they’ve obtained – in each question or just globally – at the end of the quiz. On the launch of a quiz, it is possible to easily indicate if you want the questions or the answers (multiple-choice) to appear randomly. It is also possible to live monitor the answers progress of all the students.
• The results can be afterwards exported to a spreadsheet file.
• Right now, the authentication progress is not connected to Fenix. The teacher should inform the students in which room the quiz will be launched. When the quiz starts the student should input an identification, typically the Tecnico ID.
• There is a student and teacher interface on the web, but both can be downloaded as an app to your smartphone.
• It is possible to upload a picture illustrating the question.
• Students can’t upload files to the platform.
• Questions can’t be replied with drawings, graphics or formulas.

Users experience

These type of quizzes have been used for some years by some teachers of the Chemistry Department as a complement of evaluation, for example, by doing a series of 15 quizzes through the semester and then use the 10 best to further improve the final grade by 10%. This strategy has allowed students to be more aware and interested on the contents lectured and also to further improve the students’ attendance to classes on the final weeks of the semester, being one of the course units that introduced this type of quizzes, on a course of about 90 students, improved the attendance numbers from 20 (without quizzes) to around 70 (with quizzes).

How to

On Socrative it is necessary to sign up as a teacher, providing an e-mail and password (that does not relate to the IST credentials in any way).

Afterwards, a menu pops up where you can create a quiz on a classroom which name you should provide to your students when you deploy the quiz.

When you are about the deploy the quiz, the first thing you need to do is choosing if you intend to add the quiz to a list of previously created ones. Then you can choose between “Instant Feedback” – stopping the student from rewinding to previously answered questions; “Open Navigation” – allowing the student to freely navigate through the entire quiz without imposing no limitations; and finally “Teacher Paced” – the professor controls the rhythm in which students can reply to what question, also live monitoring their responses. Finally, you can choose if you intend (or not) to receive the students’ id, if the questions and responses (multiple choice) appear randomly, to instantly provide feedback after students have answered a question or when they’ve finished the entire quiz. It is also possible to allow a student to only enter the app once per quiz – for this specific functionality, it needs to be uploaded on the classroom a list in .cvs with the name and number of the student (Student ID). Only students with that number can open the quiz and if the student, for any reason, exits the program, Socrative will recover the progress until the last answered question.