JANET RANKIN: A common active learning technique
that people often use, or maybe the first technique
that they use, is personal response systems.
So that's an opportunity for students
to respond to a question.
And that can be anything.
It's usually a multiple choice question,
but it doesn't have to be.
And it can be anything from a show of hands--
who thinks the answer is A, who thinks the answer is B,
who thinks the answer is C--
to dedicated devices and applications
that allow students to respond to questions.
So there's pros and cons for each
of the different techniques, but the essence
of all the techniques is that students
are given an opportunity to think about the answer
that they think is correct, and then respond to that.
And there is evidence to show, research
that shows, that when students make a claim, when they're
asked to make a public response, a public claim as to what they
think the correct answer is, that makes them more committed
to the answer.
And then they're more likely to remember or to even notice
if their answer is incorrect.
It primes the student for learning.
And that's the biggest advantage for any
of these personal response systems.
The disadvantage with having students raise their hands
is that in a big lecture hall, it can be hard to count, right?
It can be hard to say, OK, how many people raised
their hand when I said A?
How many when I said B, etc.
So that can take up time and it can be pretty inaccurate.
The other thing that people do sometimes
is they'll use like, just a sheet of paper.
They'll put on letters and then the students
can fold the paper up.
And depending on how they want to vote,
they just hold it up so that really only you can see it.
Point of fact is other students can kind of tell what
the other students answered.
And if I know that a friend of mine
always gets the answer right, then I
might just look and see what he or she said
and then answer the same.
So it might not give us a real accurate measurement
of what every student thinks.
The other problem with that is this
can be hard to read in a big lecture hall.
Sort of the first kind of digital or electronic personal
response systems were these dedicated clickers,
is what they're called.
And students literally, they log into the system.
They turn their devices on.
And you ask a question, and then the students
respond A, B, C, D using the touch pad.
Some clickers lets students actually
type answers, so open response.
They can actually type a word, or a number,
or a set of numbers.
So that can give you a little bit more flexibility.
And then the software on the instructor's computer
will create a histogram of responses.
So you know right away the distribution of responses.
If you have more than 70% of the students
get the question right, you probably
just want to state the correct answer and move on.
You can also say, if you didn't get it right,
here's some extra resources or go to the TA office hours,
or whatever.
But in general, if more than 70% of the students get it right,
you can move on.
One thing I like to do is if I really have a resounding,
say 75%, get it right, I like to ask a follow-up clicker
question that says, how confident were you
in your answer?
Because sometimes students will just guess.
And if you give them the opportunity to say,
yeah, I got it right, but I don't really know why--
that might be the situation sometimes, that a lot of people
get it right, but not that many people know what's going on.
So you want to know that too.
If between 30 and 70 get it correct,
then I like to move into the pair share.
So I like to say, OK.
Let's divide up.
Looks like we have a pretty good split of answers.
So let's talk to each other and we
can do some peer-peer learning where
peers can try to argue their point to whoever
is sitting next to them.
And then I ask them to vote again.
Now, when things are working well,
people actually converge to the correct answer.
And generally speaking-- I think it was Eric Mazur
has a preliminary research study that
shows that when you put two students
with the incorrect answer together,
they actually tend to converge to the correct answer
because they argue each other out
of their respective wrong answers.
So that can be pretty effective.
You do have to have a pretty good distribution
of incorrect answers for that to work.
If two students had the same incorrect answer, generally,
speaking they stay embedded with the incorrect answer.
If less than 30% of students get the correct answer,
you probably just want to stop and reformulate
your explanation and really go over everything again,
because that's really not a lot of people
that know what's going on.
So that's the general ballpark for how to proceed
with the clicker questions.
In between the pieces of paper and the clickers
are some newer technologies, new applications.
One is there's a few applications
for web-enabled devices, like Socrative,
which is a software that you can download.
The instructor downloads it and then
students log into a room using their web-enabled device.
So they log in and then no one has to buy anything extra,
but you are assuming that every student has
a web-enabled device, and you are
saying you're happy if they take them out
in your class, which may not be true for everyone.
So that's the issue with that, access
and also whether you want the smart phones out.
An application that I think is a really great compromise
is something called plickers, with a P, P L I C K E R S.
And with that, the instructor downloads an application
on his or her smartphone or web-enabled device,
it has to be a device with a camera.
And then the instructor downloads these PDFs,
which are just pieces of paper with these patterns on them.
They're all different, and I believe you get 40 patterns
for free and they're reusable.
And so each one is unique and you give them to the students.
And students then vote A, B, C or D.
There's four sides to the shape and four letters, A, B, C, D.
And if they think the answer is A,
they hold it with the A at the top.
If they think it's B, they hold it
with the B at the top, et cetera.
And you can use your web-enabled device,
and you scan the crowd with the software,
and that actually picks up the responses
and creates a histogram.
So I think that's a really nice compromise,
because it gives you the histogram,
it has student anonymity, and students
don't need anything but the piece of paper
that you gave them.
And you can actually reuse the piece of paper.
We printed sets on card stock, which are pretty durable.
And we can use them over and over again,
so the students don't need any extra technology.
For educators that are thinking about using
some kind of personal response system for their students,
there's a couple different levels of how far in to get
and how fast.
The first step would be to construct some really good,
thoughtful questions that students can answer
in a multiple choice way.
That would let you use the clickers, or a show of hands,
or any of the other methods.
It is important to construct the clicker questions in a way
that students know they're really meaningful, that you're
not just asking kind of silly questions.
You want to ask them questions that are a bit rich
and that also lend themselves, as I said to, if students,
you know if a decent number don't get them right,
that lend themselves to that peer-peer interaction,
that sort of debate with each other.
So want to think carefully about your learning outcomes, what
you want students to know or be able to do
by the end of the class.
And you want to construct questions
that help them get there and test
whether they're there or not.
So you might use one, or two, or three questions in a class.
And that might be it, that might be all you do.
But you do want to make sure that you construct
the questions thoughtfully.
The next-- sort of if you want to go further in,
is to think about what it is, really think critically about,
your learning outcome.
What do I want students to get out
of this class, this particular class?
And then construct a series of clicker questions
that really help students understand
whether they get it or not.
Help them argue their point with others
or encourage them to argue their opinion or point with others.
And then ultimately, come to a realization
or come to attain the learning outcomes really
by engagement with the clicker questions
and by engagement in a subsequent discussion.
So where the clicker questions are really
the core of your class and the learning
happens sort of threaded among those questions.