Using ‘Kahoot’ in Law School: Differentiated Instruction for Working Adults with Diverse Learning Abilities

Daniel Seah
Singapore University of Social Sciences
Singapore

This paper explores the benefits of using a game-based learning app to assess the learning progress of law students with diverse learning abilities. The School of Law at the Singapore University of Social Sciences is an innovative law school with a practice-oriented mission. It trains legal practitioners to represent the vulnerable and disadvantaged in the areas of family and criminal law, and the law school consciously enrols students who are working adults with some experience in both fields. Classes are conducted in the evenings during weekdays and contact time for each course with the lecturer is about three hours. One corollary of the law school’s enrolment approach is the considerable variation in the students’ learning aptitude. A good number last attended formal education more than a decade ago; and others experience difficulties in adapting to the intellectual demands of legal studies at a degree level. A few struggle with the law school’s persistent inculcation of legal reasoning and strong proficiency in English, which are essential legal skills. The author’s principal challenge is to teach tort law at a suitable level, which caters at once to the gifted and uninitiated students. A game-based learning app, Kahoot, is used in every class after 20 minutes of teaching. Three multiple-choice questions are created to test complex concepts, and Kahoot generates statistics to indicate how the students fared. The lecturer uses the statistics to assess the level of understanding and reinforce learning by explaining the poorly answered question on Kahoot. The anonymity accorded by Kahoot allows students to participate actively. As the course progressed over 12 weeks, the lecturer invited students to share their reasons for choosing the correct and wrong answers. This differentiated learning approach, advanced through Kahoot, promotes student-centred learning which appears to be reflected in the quality of their written assessments.