With the advances in ARS technology and relative ease of use it is becoming very simple to just pose questions to your audience without giving much thought to why the question is being asked and if it is the best use of your voting time.
The excerpt below is a a very general audience response system learning strategy that uses a simplified version of Laurillard’s model. The technique is as follows:
- The lecturer sets an exercise, either written or on-line
- Students work on the exercise, in a specific session, or in their own time
- The submission represents the student’s understanding of the material at this stage
- The lecturer marks the submissions, making a list of misconceptions that repeatedly occur
- An EVS [Electronic Voting System or Audience Response System] session is developed containing one or more questions related to each misconception. A key aspect of the questions is that the students must engage deeply with the misunderstood concepts in order to answer
This format is repeated for each misconception identified by the lecturer.
Proposed benefits of this approach include:
- The students are made more aware of the importance of engaging with feedback.
- More iterations of the learning cycle of (Fig. 1) take place, providing opportunities to enhance learning.
- Teaching effort is directed to areas demonstrated to be required by students.
- The lecturer’s involvement may lead to a better understanding of how the misconceptions have arisen.
- Committing to an answer and then defending their own viewpoints and/or accommodating the viewpoints of others results in deeper understanding of the concepts by students (Dufresne et al., 1998). The to-and-fro nature of the discussion between peers represents a number of additional cycles around the dialogue loop.
- The peer discussion also helps those students who originally got the question correct, because the need to articulate their reasoning to others is likely to deepen their understanding. In effect, they are supporting the learning activities of others, and to do this convincingly, must work to understand the material thoroughly.
I can’t see why this method of using ARS with students couldn’t be used in other situations such as medical education or business workshops. Check out some other audience response system best practices.
View the full article: Using an Electronic Voting System to Promote Active Reflection on Coursework Feedback