Questions where participants type the answer, instead of choosing from a group of answers, give you an opportunity to test deeper knowledge of a topic and see how well your audience recalls content without any cues.
While multiple-choice questions leave some chance of guessing the correct answer, these open ended questions challenge players to think thoroughly and be precise. This question type is especially helpful in product or policy training where you want to put extra emphasis on specific facts.
These practical tips will help you master the language of open-ended questions and prepare for using them in your next training session!
Keep it clear
Make the question straightforward and clear, ideally with one correct answer. While questions starting with what/when/where would be a perfect match in this case, it’s probably not ideal to start with “why” as it might have several ways to phrase the correct answer. If you think your question needs some additional context, you can add a slide before it in your kahoot.
Don’t prompt
This is one of the most advanced and challenging question types in Kahoot!, so tease your players’ brains! After all, the main goal is to see how well they understand content without getting any cues in the questions or answer alternatives.
Define all spelling variations that qualify
Pay extra attention to different ways of spelling the correct answer and define which of them qualify for points. For example, if the answer is a number, will it be correct to spell out that number in text? If it’s a date, what are the possible formats to type it?
Avoid disputable answers
Build your question based on answer(s) that don’t have an alternative interpretation or other factors that might make them disputable. If you’d like to spark a discussion, we recommend to use word cloud polls instead.
Change up formats
In addition to starting with question words, e.g. “what” and “when”, you can rephrase the question into a statement and ask players to fill in the blank or finish the sentence.
Use for text and numbers
The answer to an open-ended question can be numerical, too. For example, you can ask trainees to solve a problem based on the knowledge they obtained in their latest training.
Reinforce the most important points
A question where participants type the answer is a great way to test knowledge recall without any cues. You can use it in the beginning of your training session to reinforce the most important points from the previous one.
