Modern Solutions for Student Engagement and Information Retention

Problem of Practice

Kahoot Assessments Overview

This document shows the Kahoot assessments used to measure student retention across the project. It includes the baseline, midpoint, and bonus assessment results, compares the two FYS groups, and highlights individual student progress over time.

Gimkit Game Results and Classroom Insights

This document captures student performance across three Gimkit games, including the shift from multiple choice to text input questions. It shows how engagement stayed high, but open ended recall was more difficult and gave a clearer picture of student understanding.

Analysis

I believe this strategy addressed my PoP and was successful, even though the Kahoot results are not significant enough to make a major statistical claim. The important context behind the numbers is class time. Group 1, which used Gimkit for retrieval practice, had a 45-minute class, while Group 2 had a 90-minute class. Even with less time, Group 1 still performed slightly better overall in the shared Kahoot comparison. The growth from Kahoot 1 to Kahoot 2 was not significant, but gaming seemed to help Group 1 stay on track and not fall behind despite having less instructional time.

The games also helped me see how students were interacting with the material. In the first two games, students were active, competitive, and clearly engaged. However, I noticed that some students were taking advantage of the gameplay loop to move ahead in the game, which did not always mean they understood the content deeply. That observation led to the third game that implemented a text-input model. This made the activity harder, but also more useful for measuring real recall because students had to retrieve the answer without seeing other choices.

The biggest challenge was the AI companion. I still believe it has potential, but access issues made it difficult to run consistently. If I continue this work, I will build the AI companion as a separate website or tool outside of the ChatGPT environment. I would also use a mix of multiple choice and text-input questions in Gimkit and increase the question pool.

Recommendation

I would recommend Gimkit if you want a simple way to make review more active and increase student engagement. It works well as a short warm up because students are answering questions, competing, and reviewing previous material at the same time. My biggest advice is to be intentional with the question format. Multiple choice works best for quick review and bringing energy into the room. Text input works better when you want to check if students actually remember the concept without seeing answer choices. I would also keep the games short or create a larger question pool, because repeated questions can turn the activity into memorization of the game instead of real learning.

For Custom GPT, I would be careful. It has strong potential, but access was not reliable in my DOE classroom. Test it first before making it a full class activity.