Socrative in Higher Education: Game vs. Other Uses

The integration of clickers in Higher Education settings has proved to be particularly useful for enhancing motivation, engagement and performance; for developing cooperative or collaborative tasks; for checking understanding during the lesson; or even for assessment purposes. This paper explores and exemplifies three uses of Socrative, a mobile application specifically designed as a clicker for the classroom. Socrative was used during three sessions with the same group of first-year University students at a Faculty of Education. One of these sessions—a review lesson—was gamified, whereas the other two—a collaborative reading activity seminar, and a lecture—were not. Ad-hoc questionnaires were distributed after each of them. Results suggest that students welcome the use of clickers and that combining them with gamification strategies may increase students’ perceived satisfaction. The experiences described in this paper show how Socrative is an effective means of providing formative feedback and may actually save time during lessons.