Introduction
Plickers is an amazing tool for assessing understanding in the classroom in a very unique way. Think Mentimeter but with individual answer tracking for each student. I’ve been using it in my classroom for the past two months and it has been superb tool for indicating where knowledge gaps may lie and helping to identify weak areas for specific students. I now rave about it to anyone that I happen to discuss assessment of any kind with.
What is Plickers?
Plickers is a quizzing tool with a unique twist, instead of students answering using their phones or computers they are each given a unique QR code on a piece of paper. Multiple choice questions are then displayed at the front of the classroom, students answer by orienting the piece of paper with their answer (either A, B, C, or D) and holding it up.
Each card is numbered, this is associated with the student’s name so that their individual answers to each question can be tracked. Great!
How do the answers “get into the computer” so to speak? Enter the Plickers mobile app. Once signed into the same account, the Plickers app for iOS and Android acts as both a remote for the quiz but also as a scanner for the QR codes around the room! While scanning, you can see Plickers marking which student answered correctly and those who did not.
On screen, you have the options to display:
- Names of students that have answered
- Correct/Incorrect Answers
- A graph of how many students selected each answer to a question.
Following the completion of the quiz, all of the data is collated into a “Scoresheet”. From this page you can filter your data by class, date or topic and it is presented in this lovely format. It can also be exported to a .csv file for tracking in a spreadsheet!
It also gives us the ability to drill down into the misconceptions that students may have about a given topic as we can revisit the answers that students gave to help address gaps.
For example, in the case below I can revisit a single question and see that there was some confusion between the “Title” HTML tag and the “Heading 1” tag, an understandable confusion for students starting out in this topic that I now know I need to recap and address this misconception.
Why is it so great?
I love using Plickers in my classroom. It has become an integral part of guiding my lesson planning and has even helped me identify students who needed additional support, which wasn’t always evident from their written work alone. It is a great way of giving immediate, individual feedback while the student can remain anonymous from the rest of the class, making the stress level of this type of assessment far lower than other options. This meets up with point five of formative assessment and assessment for learning, where the focus is on activating the learner as the owner of their own learning, as discussed by Black and William (2007).
My students still find the experience enjoyable too as it is something unlike the Kahoot/Blooket/Quiziz that they’ve been used to before. It requires more physical involvement in the simple act of rotating the piece of paper to their answer, giving the student additional thinking time on their answer while on other platforms there is a reward for also being the fastest to correctly answer giving us an answer that may not have been fully thought through. This aligns with the principles of formative assessment, in that part of the assessing process should help us to understand the students’ thought process, especially when combined with a set of diagnostic questions.
This hybrid form of quizzing, where quiz is run digitally but students interact via paper is a much less distracting method of assessment. At this stage, I feel that reducing the interaction with mobile devices is important for focusing students on the questions in front of them having witnessed students app switching off of Mentimeter to check SnapChat.
Setting up the quizzes is also very easy, you can either create multiple choice questions from scratch with either 2, 3, or 4 answers with or without pictures. Alternatively you can import questions from elsewhere as long as they are in the format of:
Meaning that you can bring in questions from a document, form, or even those generated by your AI of choice based on a piece of content, video or presentation!
Disclaimer: Always fact-check generated content!
Limitations
For snapshots of student understanding, Plickers is great. Whether it is being used for gap analysis, or general formative assessment through a topic it provides a good idea of what a student has retained. But of course, due to the nature of the multiple choice only model for which I place it on such a throne means that I do supplement Plickers with other forms of assessment to check problem solving and lateral thinking through the use of open ended questioning and discussion. I do of course have some favourite platforms that I use for this as well but I’ll have to cover that in another post.
The setup can also be a bit tricky, while I was teaching in a secondary school environment the sheer number of different classes that I would have to manage with cards for each student could become an organisational nightmare. There are two solutions in this environment:
- Print the Plickers cards and have students stick them to either the back or inside page of their workbooks.
- Associate the Plickers card number with a seat in your classroom and use a seating plan to ensure the same student uses the same card in your lesson.
However, being in my position at an FE college with two cohorts of students, the management is far easier.
Concluding Thoughts
Plickers has become invaluable in my teaching-planning cycle, the targeted support that I can provide to students has been effective in plugging knowledge gaps. Overall, I can’t recommend it enough. It is a powerful, engaging and low stakes way of gaining a quick snapshot of a students understanding, and I believe it is an excellent tool for educators to broaden their formative assessment toolkit!
There are free and paid tiers, the only difference with the paid tier is access to quizzes with more than five questions. I personally think it is definitely worth it. The paid tier is $71.88/£55.40 per year (or $8.99/£6.93 per month).
[1] Black, Paul & Wiliam, Dylan. (2009). Developing the theory of formative assessment. Educational Assessment Evaluation and Accountability. 21. 5-31. 10.1007/s11092-008-9068-5.
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