Socrative helps me manage formative assessments in class by providing a super-slick interface and great results in a spreadsheet. As happens to most of us at the end of the year, I fell off the wagon and had all but stopped using the tool. My colleagues and I today devised a way to conduct regular and meaningful formative assessments in class with Socrative. I believe this workflow will work especially well when the problem is a ranking task.
Example!
It’s 8:30 on Tuesday morning and you enter my classroom, wiping sleep from your eyes. On the board, I’ve projected this image:
As the teacher, I’ve set up a Socrative poll as follows:
You’ve done this before, so you know to pull up Socrative on your computer or your smartphone. You ponder the question, make some notes, rank it, and write a justification. You submit the justification while the rest of the class does the same. It looks like this:
As my student, you’re learning how to write a clear & concise explanation that’s accurate. Regular exposure (say every other class day? I’m not exactly certain yet) means your routine demands you consider why as more important than what.
Workflow
- Grab a good problem that requires justification of the answer.
- Open a Socrative “short answer” problem type.
- Invite kids to solve the problem, join the room, and submit their justification only in the answer space.
- Vote on the best justification using the mantra of “concise, clear, and accurate.”
- Discuss.
Megan Hayes-Golding 
Socrative is indeed a neat tool. I have used it with conceptual questions as you did but silly me I did not think of adding the extra touch you did by using the short answer format for justifications. Thanks for the tip!