Use of Kahoot for Assessment in Chemistry Education: A Comparative Study

Novel assessment tools are more often used in class especially after the Bologna Process (Pereira, D.; Flores, M. A.; Niklasson, I. Assess. Eval. Higher Educ. 2016, 41, (7), 1008-1032, DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2015.1055233) in Europe. Kahoot has emerged as an attractive and interactive gaming platform, and considerable education-research efforts in different kinds of subjects have been recently invested to evaluate Kahoot suitability for learning. One of the main ways of utilizing Kahoot is as an assessment tool, which has been shown to be effective in various education fields, but not yet in chemistry. Herein Kahoot was used for assessment in a whole-year chemistry class together with other more traditional means, such as solving problem sets or difficult questions. Surprisingly, students' esteem for Kahoot was the same or even less than for other means of assessment. Instead, problem solving was considered the most valuable task for the class. These results might be due to the nature of chemistry learning; although memorization is required, chemistry education places a higher weight on reasoning skills, which may cause the students to prefer training methods other than Kahoot. According to these results, the competitive incentive and playfulness of a game is less preferred than the intrinsic challenge of solving a difficult question or problem.