Engage, Live Quiz and Assessment: which session type to use

Signal has three session types: Engage, Live Quiz and Assessment. You choose one when you create a session, and that choice decides what the session is built to do.

When to use it: Before you create your first session, or any time you are not sure which type suits the lesson you are planning.

Signal works the same way wherever you run it — in your browser, in Microsoft Teams, or in Canvas. The session types, and everything on this page, are identical in all three.

Engage

Engage runs live in class, with your students in front of you. It is the most flexible session type and works as a catch-all.

Within a single Engage session you can run several different kinds of check-in: checking for engagement, questions, comments, polls, reflections, and checks for understanding. Students can also react and comment at any point, not only when you ask them to.

Everything appears in one continuous timeline that you can scroll back through, so the whole lesson stays in one place.

Live Quiz

A Live Quiz also runs live in class, but it focuses on one thing: checking for understanding.

You prepare hinge questions in advance — typically two or three across a lesson — and release them one at a time, after teaching each subtopic. Hinge questions are multiple choice questions where the incorrect options are diagnostic: each wrong answer surfaces a specific misconception rather than trying to catch students out.

Signal reads the responses as they arrive and recommends whether to reteach, recap or move on.

Assessment

An Assessment works the same way as a Live Quiz, with one difference: students receive all the questions at once and complete them in their own time.

This is the session type for homework. It can technically be run in class, but it is built for out-of-class use.

Choosing between them

The simplest version of the choice:

• Engage and Live Quiz run in class. Assessment runs outside class.
• Engage is broad. Live Quiz and Assessment are focused on understanding.

So: if you want a running read on how a lesson is landing — engagement, questions, reflections, plus the occasional check for understanding — use Engage. If you want to know whether a subtopic has landed before you move on, use a Live Quiz. If you want that same read on work students do at home, use an Assessment.

Tip: Checking for understanding and checking for engagement are two different things. A student can be fully engaged and still hold a misconception, and a quiet student may have understood everything. Engage covers both; Live Quiz and Assessment cover understanding only.