Team Short Answer has been hard at work this summer! We’ve got five updates to share here, along with several new features on the way. Read on to learn more and reach out to our team with any questions!
1. Updated Launch Modal
When choosing an activity in Short Answer, you can now easily see the average activity time, activity style, and number of required students (see image above). We hope this enables you to choose activities that better fit the context of your classroom.
2. Timed writing activities
You can now set a timer in Short Answer. When you toggle on the “Timed Activity” setting on the launch modal (see image above), all students will begin writing at the same time. When the timer goes off, all writing will be auto-submitted.
Adding this feature was a bigger decision for us than it may seem.
We will share more on this soon, but the research on timed writing is mixed. It generally suggests that timed writing conditions decrease the quality of student writing (for an excellent literature review on this topic, see this study). Overuse of timed writing activities also runs the risk of harming student writing ability by conditioning students to rush their pre-planning and revision processes. The Oregon Department of Education’s K12 writing assessment guidance has excellent advice on the topic in the context of formative vs. summative assessment.
With this research in mind, we made the decision to add timed writing to Short Answer for a few reasons. First, dozens of teachers requested it last year. They did so because, as is our intent, they are primarily using Short Answer for daily formative assessment of class content. In this context, pre-planning and revising writing is of less importance than students’ ability to quickly demonstrate their understanding of content. Second, many writers promote timed writing as an effective way to build writing stamina. For example, Natalie Goldberg argues in Writing Down the Bones that “the basic unit of writing practice is the timed exercise.” Daily, timed writing activities can be great at promoting writing fluency and productivity if structured correctly.
Our answer to this research is to make timed writing activities an option for teachers. That option reflects our pedagogical intent to combine daily writing practice with daily formative assessment of content. We will share more on this in the Short Answer Substack soon.
3. Auto-submission of student writing
All student responses will be auto-submitted when you move to the feedback round in any Short Answer activity. This ensures that all responses receive peer and AI feedback and that all responses are included for your review on the Results tab after the activity.
4. Random Emoji Power Paragraph from EduProtocols
Short Answer has partnered with EduProtocols! To kick things off, we’ve built one of our favorite EduProtocols right into Short Answer: Random Emoji Power Paragraph (REPP).
With REPP, students are given five random emojis. Their challenge? Write a single, coherent paragraph that connects all five. The randomness challenges students to organize, connect, and refine their ideas for clarity. Here’s how it can work:
Using the Random Emoji Generator in Short Answer, display one emoji at a time to the class (see image below).
For each emoji, students write a sentence that relates class content to the emoji shown.
Repeat this process for each new emoji, as students build a five-sentence paragraph.
The randomness challenges students to adapt their explanations or stories on the fly to incorporate unexpected elements. It also develops paragraph structure, as students must decide how to keep all sentences connected to a central idea. You can read more about our partnership here.
5. Difficulty settings in Quick Write
Last spring, we launched Quick Write, our first AI-powered writing activity in Short Answer (Note: Quick Write is a Short Answer Premium feature). Since then, we’ve been hard at work refining the experience based on your feedback. To start, we’ve added difficulty settings (see image above) so you can adjust how easy or challenging it is for the class to hit the score goal together.
We’re excited to share more major updates to Quick Write soon.
More to come…
We’re also hard at work on major Short Answer updates that we’re excited to begin rolling out during the ‘25-’26 school year. If you’d like to preview any of these updates before they’re public, feel free to set up a time to chat.
