Google Invites Classroom Users to Join Beta for 'Practice Sets,' with Auto-Grading, Instant Student Feedback, and More

• By Kristal Kuykendall
• 03/16/22

Google for Education today launched the beta sign-up for its new Practice Sets feature in Google Classroom, which gives students hints for solving problems and immediate feedback on their answers — and can turn teaching content into interactive assignments and automatically grade responses, Google said in a blog post.

Participation in Practice Sets beta testing is open to any educator using a Teaching and Learning Upgrade within Google Classroom, or any institution using Google Workspace for Education Plus, announced Daniel Kiecza, senior staff software engineer, in the blog post.

To sign up for the beta program, educators can fill out this form from Google for Education.

Practice Sets will supercharge teaching content; show real-time class insights to teachers; boost student confidence as they are working on assignments; and help teachers quickly identify, and pivot to address, students’ specific needs.

“With Practice Sets, educators can easily transform their own teaching content into interactive assignments and use the auto-grading tool to cut down on manual grading time,” Kiecza said in his blog post. “Practice Sets also helps teachers figure out which concepts need more instruction time and who could use extra support, giving them quick performance insights to shape future lesson plans.

“Students get real-time feedback as they complete practice sets, so they know whether they’re on the right track,” he continued. “When they're struggling to solve a problem, they can get hints through visual explainers and videos. And when they get an answer correct, practice sets will celebrate their success with fun animations and confetti!”

In an accompanying blog post explaining the Practice Sets features, Google for Education Senior Director Shantanu Sinha said the adaptive learning technology at the root of Practice Sets uses more advanced artificial intelligence than anything seen before in ed tech.

“With recent AI advances in language models and video understanding, we can now apply adaptive learning technology to almost any type of class assignment or lesson at an unprecedented scale. When students receive individualized, in-the-moment support, the results can be magical,” Sinha said.

In a recent test of Practice Sets, Sinha said, a fifth-grade teacher reported the following to Google:

“He said the instant feedback that kids received was like having a teaching assistant in the classroom at all times. The technology helped give students 1:1 attention and validation — so they knew right away whether they got a problem correct or incorrect — and drove students’ intrinsic motivation and engagement through the roof. ”

Learn more about Practice Sets on the Google for Education blog post.