This semester I was teaching a large in-person section of our general education physical geology course, ‘How The Earth Works’, for the first time since Spring 2020.
In this class students earn 20% of their overall grade for ‘participation’. Pre-pandemic, this was earned by completing activity sheets during class and handing them in at the end of class. The activities were typically a series of questions exploring a key concept being introduced in the day’s class. I would give them some time to fill them out, we would discuss the answers, and then I would collect them at the end to log for credit.
However, during the pandemic, I was converted to the virtues of using online polling software during class time to test student understanding of important concepts. Using these tools allowed me to get a more holistic sense of what the whole class was thinking, rather than just getting answers from the subset of people confident enough to stick their hand up.
The problem was that if I replaced the in-person activity sheets with electronic poll questions using a tool such as Mentimeter, I would no longer have a way of logging participation. So what to do?
Inspired by a suggestion in Distracted, by James Lang, at the end of each class I finished a few minutes early and directed the students to complete a reflection survey in the LMS. I give an example below:
The first question is a couple of Likhert-like statements – to which students can respond ‘Not really’, ‘Mostly’ or ‘Yes’ – that signpost the important concepts they are meant to understand coming out of the class. I normally added an additional slightly more light-hearted one as well, although there was normally an underlying point to it. This first question was my addition to the two questions suggested in Distracted, which ask about the thing that most struck or interested the students, and anything they didn’t understand.
My aim with these surveys was to both engage the students in the material we’d just covered, by highlighting what they should have learnt, and letting them think about what in the class made them go,‘hmmm’; and also to give me a sense of how they felt about the class. For example, a lot of ‘mostlys’, or people saying they were confused about the same thing, might point to something I should review again.
On the whole, I think it was pretty successful; it was genuinely a boost to read students’ comments where they clearly got the thing I wanted them to get, or had had their mind a little blown by something they didn’t know before. Several student evaluations at the end of term also mentioned them (and the use of polling) in positive terms. However, there were a few things I need to work on in future iterations:
- Some students took to directly quoting statements from my lecture slides (often one of the first ones they could find), which doesn’t really meet the aim of students actively engaging with what they had just heard about in class.
- Although I finished class a few minutes early to give students time to complete the reflection before they left, I did leave the it open for a few hours to accommodate students who were having to go a long way across campus between classes, etc. But this meant that some students worked out they could complete the survey without coming to class*.
- Whilst I did occasionally highlight particular questions and comments arising in these surveys in the subsequent class, and I certainly used them as fodder for pre-exam review sessions, I think I could do more to explicitly respond to what students have said.
Still, I was largely pleased with this little experiment, and I plan to continue it.
*I suspect there is a lot of overlap between this problem category and the previous one; or, as I saw it very evocatively put on Twitter the other day, the Venn diagram is close to a total eclipse.
