Last year, AsiaTEFL held their annual conference in Goyang. Fortunately, I was able to secure a ticket and go to the sparsely attended conference. I will have further discussions on the conference in future posts.

I was fortunate to have one of my topics of interest addressed by the speakers. Namely, the use of games in the classroom. Two of the talks focused on the new edutainment platform Kahoot. If you’re not aware of this new platform, I will take a moment to explain. At its heart, Kahoot lets users create quizzes and share those quizzes in a classroom guided form or a self-study method. In the guided form, the teacher shows the questions to the students and student join the quiz on a mobile device or computing platform. They answer the questions on that platform within the time frame, the correct answer for the question is displayed, and the teacher moves onto the next question at their leisure (or in my case, after complaining when students choose the blatantly wrong answer). In the self-study method, teachers can set the quiz on a schedule and pass the game entry code to their students. The students will complete the quiz on their own time within the deadline you set.

I use Kahoot fairly frequently in my classes as a way of spicing up the grammar and other quizzes that dot our class textbook Fast Track 1. When I saw the conference guidebook, I saw two presentations that immediate caught my interest since they related to Kahoot. Student perceptions of Kahoot as Online quiz tools for teaching and learning process in Intensive English by Nasrullah N. and Elsa Rosalina and In Kahoots_ Studying a Gamification App that Brings Students Together by Dr. Reynolds & B. Taylor. What can we learn from their research on this gaming platform’s classroom effectiveness?

Looking at the data from Nasrullah & Rosalina’s presentation, we find that many students liked using Kahoot. Many of the 39 university students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I find Kahoot exciting, interesting, fun and motivating.” Given how colorful, musical, time-limiting, and the leaderboard aspect of the quizzes, I can’t say I disagree. Heck, I find it much more exciting to give the quiz as it makes me feel like a game-show host. In their main discussion they found their results supported by Keengwe et. Al (Wieking, 2016) that students categorized either as conventional, risky or very high achievers all have successful learning experiences because of technology. It’s good that students are viewing the quiz tool positively and that they feel it is helping them in the class. But is it helping them learn? That is the subject of the next video.

Dr. Reynolds and Taylor noted that research on the efficacy of mobile technology showcased serious shortcomings and they wanted to see if the app would help with vocabulary acquisition. After a brief demonstration of the app, they looked at how it helped their students at Woosong retain vocabulary. 115 first-year college students at Woosong participated in the survey along with 8 teachers in the online class for 1st year English conversation. All students in the study took a pre-test and post-test using the vocabulary words covered in the study. Unfortunately, the experimental group only showed a slight improvement in their retention in the vocabulary, which isn’t statistically significant. However the control group lost retention significantly. They didn’t find statistically significant improvement according to the data under the Wilcoxon Signed-ranks test. Students neither performed better or worse than traditional methods. They also found that their students enjoyed the Kahoot quizzes, which matches what the previous study I talked about found.

Taylor noted that while it was easy to think of using Kahoot the same way as a powerpoint, but it wasn’t always the same way when teaching online. Specifically there were issues when students only had access to one device and thus it is a bit tricky to swap between Zoom app and Kahoot app/website during the game. Every second counts in a Kahoot game as that is how points are distributed. If you and another player both choose the correct answer, both you and that player get points. HOWEVER, the student who chooses the answer FASTER gets more points than the slower student. Essentially a student fortunate enough to have two devices would have the advantage because they would see the question and the answer choices at the same time whereas the student using the phone for class would have to switch apps to choose the answers. Using the self-study quiz could improve some of this problem.

Going forward, both research groups found student motivation increased and enjoyed the quizzes. Students look forward to the quiz games and maybe even improved student attendance. It all depends on how you use it. Can you use it as a graded replacement of quizzes? Dr. Reynolds and Taylor say that it might be tricky because there will be glitches/signal drop and the distracting nature of the app might affect how they interpret the scores on the quiz. The students might not take the quizzes seriously but in the poll the students seem to take it seriously in their survey.

Taylor’s idea was to have the students taking the quizzes earlier in the semester so bugs can be ironed out faster and they have more time to get used to the format. Don’t forget to have a backup plan in case the Internet goes down. Setup tip: 10 to 15 questions, 30 seconds per question, starting the class with the quiz, and making it part of the routine. Also, reduce the size/length of the questions, make questions relevant to covered material, and use photos to help students choose answers faster. Fundamentally, it makes the class more interesting but don’t count on it to guarantee retention.

If you want to contact the study authors, leave a comment down below and I’ll pass on their contact info. I’m sure it’s somewhere in the videos.