Three Ways to Improve Students’ Test Scores With Kahoot

AP Lang multiple choice can be tough to tackle. When my students took their second full-length mock exam at the beginning of April, I was hopeful that students might gain four or five questions over their first exam.

Try an average of NINE questions’ growth in eight weeks! I was floored. Multiple kids actually doubled their original scores.

What made the difference? According to my students, frequent practice using a tech tool called Kahoot. Even if you’ve never heard of Kahoot, chances are, your students have. Understandably, it has become my hands-down favorite way to practice AP Lang multiple choice questions in class.  I’ve been playing with different ways to make it helpful for my students. The strategies I’ll share today are, according to my students and the test data, the most effective ways I’ve tried in my own classroom.

1. Prep the passage first. I give students the passage but no questions. They can take it home, annotate all over it, work it. When they come back, they work in teams to answer the questions. I put the 120-second time limit on this one because I want them to engage in discussion about the questions.
2. Team prep with stems. Each team has 15-20 minutes to read and answer the question stems (minus the ABCDE options). They get 30 seconds to match their analysis to the answer to each question.
3. Individual prep, individual response. This is useful when I want students to practice independently with a time limit. I administer the passage like a quiz (my standard timing formula is one minute per question plus one minute). Then students log in on their individual devices to answer the questions. We talk about the answers along the way.

It’s worth noting a couple of drawbacks at this point. One, you can only enter four answers (the AP test has five). Two, the questions and answer are character-limited, so I sometimes have to get creative. Really , though, I’m okay with these drawbacks considering the tremendous growth in my students’ scores.

Go ahead, give it a try. It’s a real (ka)hoot! 😜