Typeform Review: Create elegant student assessments, surveys, and quizzes

Microsoft and Google Forms are great, but they sometimes feel a little tacked on, an afterthought pulled together to tick a box. There have been many times when I wanted to add an extra spice to a form (like adding images to quiz questions, inserting a video, or calculating a score) but each time I’ve hit a brick wall. Even using a dedicated survey service like Survey Monkey, my forms can end up looking stale and uninviting to students.

That’s when I started to experiment with Typeform.

What is Typeform?

Typeform is one of those web apps which has slowly infiltrated my life. It’s the Zoom of survey apps. I first discovered it when signing up to an email newsletter, but more recently I’ve see schools and businesses embedding Typeform surveys into websites, and using them for customer feedback.

It’s one of those services which has grown steadily in popularity, and I can understand why.

Unlike a lot of similar services, Typeform lets you create forms, surveys, and quizzes which are simple and elegant to fill out, but can be deviously complex in the background. Typeform forms are brilliantly minimalist and allow students to focus on the question and answer, rather than have to deal with a cluttered interface of logos, links, and menus. They’re equally great at collecting a single email address or creating a web of threaded logic for student assessments.

When I use other form services, I often feel pressure to complete the questions quickly, in case the page times out or refreshes and doesn’t save my progress. In this respect Typeform is a solid upgrade from most form apps. Students can quickly and reliably navigate back and forward through questions without fear of losing their work. Completed answers are also saved as the student works, so there’s no risk of them loosing questions before they click the submit button.

Creating your first Typeform

Typeform lets you choose from hundreds of form templates and designs, but if you’re feeling more ambitious, you can create a custom design from scratch. You can also select from one of the pre-built surveys, questionnaires, forms, or polls. These are great for developing new ideas for quizzes, but also save you a ton of time.

If you dig deep enough you’ll find quiz templates covering a variety of subject areas, including maths, vocab, science, and geography. Just fill in your own questions and share with your students.

Typeform for student assessments

Typeform is great for building student assessments, particularly when distance learning. Using the block design window, you can build and customise questions exact to your requirements, and set a score for each answer which will automatically be totalled at the end of the assessment.

Typeform can then spit out statistics and analysis about the answers students gave, and push them out into other school services (such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets) to be added to your mark book.

You can also go really deep with assessment score calculations by setting specific marks for certain answers, and then automatically calculating an overall score at the end.

If your students are distance learning, or you can’t be sure the type of devices that they will be using, you can be sure that they can access your form as Typeform is fully responsive and works on any device with a web browser.

Question types and media

Typeform doesn’t just support text questions. You can also add images and video plus a range of additional questions types:

One things I’ve just realised, not that I’m recommending this of course, but you could create an assessment and then add a payment field at the end. Just saying. Maybe you could tie the result of the assessment to the value of the payment….anyway.

Setting up your form & editing questions

Typeforms are built using a point-and-click block style interface. You just choose the type of question you want, enter the question text, and then choose the settings for each question. Every change is updated live in the preview window, so you can see exactly what the students will see on screen when completing the form.

Question logic & student differentiation

Logic Jump lets you create a Typeform that responds to people’s answers. It works like branching questions in Microsoft Forms, but it’s far more intelligent and gives you greater control over the route a student takes through your form.

It’s also a great for building differentiation into your student assessments. For example, a student scoring a higher mark on early questions could be redirected to a bank of harder questions or questions designed to probe more deeply into specific knowledge they may have.

Reviewing results

Survey results can be analysed within Typeform itself, or pulled out into external services, such as Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or even Power BI. You can also export results for adding to your mark book.

Typeform Integrations

Typeform connects with hundreds of apps so you can analyse the results you’ve gathered and do much more with your data. And if you’re feeling technical you can set up webhooks and use the Typeform APIs to create solutions that adapt to your school’s requirements..

Typeform integrates with..

• Google Sheets
• Google Docs
• Google Drive
• Microsoft 365
• Mailchimp
• Dropbox
• Zoho
• Trello

…so you can do things like drop survey results straight into your class Google Sheets, or save an uploaded file to your Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.

If the app you want to send data to isn’t on the list above, Typeform also integrates with Zapier which can interact with more than 500 additional services including Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive and even SMS messages.

If you want to get even more technical, you can even use a Zapier “Zap” to analyse and extra data from from your survey results automatically and import them into a spreadsheet.

Verdict

Typeform is a refreshing change from traditional survey and quiz apps. It’s simple enough that you can use it to grab some quick feedback from staff and students, but feature rich enough that you can build it out to become an assessment system with automatic score calculations.

Try Typeform by signing up for a free account. Share what you build in the comments.