Three teaching things: week of May 16
This week: why audience response systems improve student learning; a contract grading example and; a tool to add interactivity to online videos.
Issue #47
1. A systematic review of audience response systems for teaching and learning in higher education: The student experience.
Audience response systems (or clickers, or classroom response systems) are a group of technologies that allow an instructor to simultaneously engage learners, most often in a larger classroom setting. When used to facilitate a technique like peer instruction (see the paper in this issue of TTT for more on that), research indicates that audience response systems are part of a system of instruction that “up” student learning.
As systematic reviews do, this paper reports on a body of peer-reviewed literature. In this case, that body is 20 qualitative (or mixed method) studies that conduced empirical research on the use of audience response systems in learning settings with more than 30 learners.
The paper’s payoff is the authors’ model (pp. 10-11) detailing how audience response systems work to support student learning (see Figure 2, p. 12, for a visualization of the three related level of factors).
Key for me, audience response systems are the tool that allow for the quick & efficient collection of a snapshot of student understanding. What the instructor does with this student data is what makes a difference for learning: “just” asking students questions is less effective than the instructor using the insights into student learning to adapt their own future instruction.
The paper’s short conclusion (p. 13) provides further direction from the systematic analysis to tune instructional practice, including highlighting the importance of question design, and the timing of polling students.
Wood, R., & Shirazi, S. (2020). A systematic review of audience response systems for teaching and learning in higher education: The student experience. Computers & Education, 153, 103896. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103896
2. Contract grading
Exploring the world of ungrading, I was directed to this post on Lindsey Albracht’s website that includes examples of documents she uses for a “contract grading system” in teaching.
As you might expect from the name, contract grading is an approach to assessment that has a student and an instructor agree to a set of expectations and work which directly equate to a final course grade (the contract).
Albracht links to her agreement and a work log, which are part of her overall system.
3. Edpuzzle
Edpuzzle is a tool that allows educators to add an instructional layer over online videos, including the ability to cut irrelevant sections, add your own voice-overs (with some limitations based on the source of the video) and add notes or questions for students to answer.
The revised videos can be shared with others, like this one (a six-minute video I just edited down to 30 seconds and added a note & multiple choice question).
Like most of these tools, there is a limited free version, and a paid upgrade.
Three Teaching Things is a weekly newsletter compiled by Gavan Watson, which shares three different teaching and learning resources (papers, resources or tools) worth your attention.
Next week’s issue will mark the first anniversary of this newsletter. What started as an experiment has (almost) grown to a sustained year-long effort. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to write this over the year, but I will be taking a hiatus over the summer months. Not quite sure what that look like yet, but wanted to give you a heads-up to expect a change in frequency of publishing at the end of May.
Thanks for reading!