Last month Astronomy Professor Steve Schneider presented on his experience with using the Personal Response System with a particular focus on his strategies for writing good PRS questions. Professor Schenider says he’s been using PRS systems in various incarnations for 10 years, primarily with his large lecture course Astronomy 101. Here are some lessons he shared with the group on how he uses PRS:
Getting students oriented
Professor Schenider walks the students through the basics of the clicker in the first couple classes to avoid confusion down the road. Teaching such a large course he runs into most of the problems students can ever experience. He’s learned to keep a stock of batteries on hand for the students who inevitably run down the batteries on their clickers. Students register their clickers using the OWL system, he awards extra credit for students who register before the deadline for doing so. OWL also provides some useful grading tools for evaluating the student responses to the questions. Student used to be very forgetful about bringing their clickers, but as more and more instructors use them it has been less of an issue.
Red Questions and Purple Questions
Professor Schenider uses two types of questions when making use of PRS in class. Purple questions (denoted by the color of the background on the PowerPoint slides) are survey questions where students receive credit simply for answering. Professor Schenider particularly likes to use these types of questions for introducing topics and challenging student’s preconceptions: “I have some students who think they know it all, but they fall it to these traps, it’s way of destabilizing [them].” Red questions are “quiz” questions where the correct answers matter. He awards credit for answering, but extra credit for selecting the correct answer. He feels that giving credit is an important part of using PRS successfully; by giving credit for an activity, you demonstrate to the student that you value the work and want them to value it in turn. Said Schenider, “students are all economists… if you assign points you’re taking it seriously, and they will too.”
Professor Schenider likes to end every lecture with a “red” question that will be addressed at the start of the next class. In this way, he hopes to get students thinking about astronomy concepts outside of class. He also uses this as a way to minimize students packing up early. Depending on the question he may give them the choice to change their answer the next class.
Question Technique and Promoting Discussions
Professor Schenider initially used PRS to ask “simple” questions that would measure if students were doing the reading, but this was unpopular. Students saw this as using PRS simply to take attendance, adding to the frustration of having to pay for the device that would measure said attendance. From there, Professor Schenider has moved on to significantly more challenging questions, sometimes choosing the toughest exam questions that he hopes will provoke discussion. When two answer to a question come out evenly matched, that can be a good choice for a mini-debate. He much prefers this method for provoking good interaction between the students (which means you need to give them time to talk and discuss the answers.) He reports that the students also seem to appreciate the preview on types of question to expect on the exams.
Another frequent technique Professor Schenider uses in his course is physics demonstrations. He asks students to make predictions about the outcome of an experiment. When students have to consider the outcome ahead of time, they invest in an answer, he hears students exclaim “yes!” when they get a right answer even if the question isn’t graded. Professor Schenider has been using demonstrations in class for many years but feel that students don’t always retain the concept they are meant to introduce, his hope is that PRS questions will make those concepts and theories more memorable.
The number of questions to ask in a given class session is something he played with over time. He currently asks 6 questions in a 75 minute class period.
Good Questions
Professor Schenider revises and changes his questions every semester. He experiments with a wide variety of questions types: survey questions, hypothetical situations, and questions with multiple selections that require ranking. Given his subject area of Astronomy math-based questions play a frequent role, but rather than simply asking students to pick the correct answer from a list, Schenider likes to ask students to choose which principles or rules are necessary to solve a given problem.
Ultimately, Professor Schenider shares, “good questions come from bad questions, questions from exams students do poorly on- for me they grow out of that.”