Formative Assessment

How to Use MyBrainPOP Class Summaries for Formative Assessment

Posted by SM Bruner on

If you have a school-wide of district BrainPOP or BrainPOP Jr. subscription, you have access to our MyBrainPOP features!

MyBrainPOP lets students and teachers keep track of learning through individual accounts.  Each student and teacher logs in with their own username and password.
When logged in students take a quiz from BrainPOP or the BrainPOP Quiz Mixer and when they play select Games on GameUp (including Sortify and Timezone X), you as the teacher can view a class summary to see at a glance how they did.

Benefits of MyBrainPOP class summaries

The class summary is designed to be a formative assessment, and give a high-level view of how the class is doing on a concept to guide further instruction. Here are a few benefits of using the class summary:

Quick summary enables quick intervention: You don’t have to wait until an entire class set of papers is graded to see what students know. Glancing over your class summary will show you just how many students are demonstrating mastery and allow you to change course or adapt your instruction before the next lesson.

Follow-up instruction can be based on current mastery levels: Because you can see at a glance how your class is doing, you’ll know right away whether to move on to the next skill or re-teach your lesson.

Differentiation is easier: Because you can easily see how each student performed on individual quiz questions or sortify categories, you can group students for remediation so that they’re working only on the skills/concepts they need help with.

Detailed data helps you extend student learning: The class summary shows you which students have mastered the content so you can ensure they’re being challenged through extension activities. My BrainPOP spreadsheet

How to use class summaries for formative assessment

We don’t recommend that you use students’ scores on games to truly summarize assessment or translate into grades. This is the reason we use a color gradient to show student performance rather than a numerical score.

The color gradient that students are scored on comes in a few different hues. You can see the short description of what these hues mean by checking the “About” section at the top of each class summary in your MyBrainPOP dashboard.

My BrainPOP spreadsheet

Here are some ways you might use the class summary as formative assessment:

Group student data by performance level: Simply click on the column heading of a concept that’s important for your curriculum to have student data automatically grouped by performance. The students that have a light gray or light green for this column may just have not wanted to use this concept or they might not understand it very well, so you can explore the cause and provide appropriate follow-up. You can also challenge them to play again, and this time, try to get a dark green for the concept.

View additional details for students who are not demonstrating mastery: Click on an individual student’s name to see a detailed view of that student’s work history (see below). Quiz scores are listed and you can click to view and/or grade SnapThought® prompts. For Sortify, you can see which individual tiles the student go right and wrong. For TimeZone X, you’ll see how many events out of the total the student placed for each deck. Student view in MyBrainPOP Have you used the class summaries in My BrainPOP? Please share your ideas, experiences, or questions in the comments below.