Ultimate Guide to Feedback in a Google Form – Part 2

Google Forms has several features that can provide feedback at different times based on responses to questions. This article covers how to provide IMMEDIATE feedback during a form. We have a matching Group in SharingTree called “How to provide IMMEDIATE Feedback in Google Forms” with all the templates used in this article. If you sign-in and click open, the forms are added to your Google Drive, and you can view and edit them as you progress through this article. 

Some of the WHY questions for using immediate (during) or delayed feedback (after submission) are discussed below by Christy Tucker. The focus of this article is to show HOW to provide immediate feedback during a Google Form.

Part 1 – Immediate Feedback during a Google Form

Google Forms provides two ways to provide immediate feedback. These are Branching/Go to section for MC questions or using Response validation for short answer. For a complete list of question types Forms supports see this link from Google.

I have sample forms with questions that you can use as a template for each feedback type we discuss. If you click the link all the Google forms and a google sheet with all the article links can be added to your Google Drive by opening the group. Some of the settings required in Forms are not obvious, so having an example can be helpful. In this article, I’ll describe examples for each feedback type and how I use them with my students.

Part 1.1-Branching or Go to Section

One way to use the Branching/Go to Section option is to circle back to the same MC question for incorrect responses and only move forward if the correct answer is selected.

To do this in a Google Form, I place each MC question in one section and then make a second ‘retry’ section with the same question that all incorrect responses go to. In the second retry section, I let them know they missed the question and allow them to reattempt it. This feedback type example requires the student to select the correct response before moving on to the next question. The only difference between this and a standard MC question is using the three dots option to select ‘Go to section based on answer‘. Shuffling the option order is also fine and does not interfere with the branching to the correct location.

The next two images show the original question section and the retry section using the ‘Go to section’ option. Now would be a good time to open the Google form template called ‘Feedback during Google Form using Branching‘ to see this structure.

I name the retry section with the question number and some text to indicate they made an incorrect selection. I then place a duplicate copy of the question in this section, and all incorrect responses go to this one retry section.

I make all the questions ‘Required‘ and you can choose to make the Form a QUIZ and give point values to each question. You can make a correct response to the original question worth a certain point value and a correct retry attempt worth fewer points. Using original and retry point values can help you understand how many attempts students are taking and discourage guessing. I use this question format for lessons and weekly assignments to gauge student completion. Here is the link to the template Google Form using the basic two-section feedback method. Another option is for each incorrect response to go to a different section with specific feedback for that response.

Kasey Bell from Shake Up Learning has a good article on using this branching ability to give specific instruction based on each response and Alice Keeler also discusses this in her article “Fast: Create a Branching Google Form“. This instruction could include a mini-lesson using text, images, or video added to a review/retry section of the form. Only students who responded a certain way would view this section. 

Part 1.2-Response Validation

The second method you can use for immediate feedback during a Google form is ‘Response validation‘. This feedback only works for short answer questions, and it requires the response to be a specific word(s) or numeric value before going to the next question or section. Megan Kelly has a good article on different ways this feedback option can be used.

My Google Form template showing this feedback method is here and all the forms and articles are part of the group “Types of Feedback in Google Forms“.

Lastly, if you have a complicated response requirement, like multiple words or a phone number, Google allows using a Regular Expression for the response validation. For an example Google form with a regular expression, see this form where Question 2 uses a regular expression to check for multiple correct text responses.

Now is a good time, if you have not already done it, to open the Group in SharingTree called “How to provide IMMEDIATE Feedback in Google Forms” with all the templates used in this article. Google Forms is a flexible tool if you understand the different options for questions and feedback. We hope this article helped and check out part 1 of this topic, where we cover providing DELAYED feedback after a Google Form is submitted. 

This article is part of a series SharingTree is creating focused on Distance Learning using G Suite. Click here to sign up to receive our weekly email.