A couple years ago, we combined 2 of our 3 intro biology courses into a single organismal course, providing me the opportunity to start teaching our introductory cell biology class. When I began working on my prep for the different class, I was interested in introducing more teaching methods that have proven to be so effective in science education over the past decade, but because all of the material was new for me to teach, I defaulted to the more familiar lecture-driven approach. Now that I have been through the course twice, I felt more comfortable trying some of these new approaches this fall.
So what are these “new approaches” I keep alluding to? I mean, for example, things like Just-in-Time teaching, pioneered as a means to teach college physics; clicker questions to test and challenge students during class; more activities during class that enable students to really think and develop understanding of the material, rather than act like scribes and copy down everything I say. I’ll try to write more about my implementation of the first and third approaches later, but I want to focus on my incorporation of clicker questions for now.
My first problem with implementing clicker questions was, I don’t have any clickers. And neither do my students. Instead of asking them to buy one on top of their $169 textbook, I did some research about asking clicker questions without clickers. Most of the options involve the web, as I expected, but one of them, Poll Everywhere, also includes the option for respondents to use text messaging as a means of response. I figured most of my students would be able to get on the web in class, but all of them would at least have their cell phones, so this is the path I chose. Plus, this way maybe they or their parents could deduct the cost of their SMS plan as an educational expense, right?
Poll Everywhere is designed with a number of use cases in mind, including everything from taking a live poll of an anonymous audience to classroom use. Because I wanted to use the response data as part of my students’ grade, I needed to sign up for a paid plan. This allows me to see a list of participants and associate a response with a given student. The registration process for my students went smoothly, I emailed them a special link that took them to an account creation page and automatically associated them with my class. Those students using text messaging to respond had to text a unique code that linked their cell phone to their account.
Now that all of those logistics are settled, it works like a charm. I can pose a question in class and the results show up in real time, just like the purpose-built clickers would but with one big advantage. I can ask open-ended questions in addition to multiple-choice ones, and students can text in their free responses. This works great for big picture kinds of brainstorming, then I can collect all of the responses and, for instance, make a word cloud of them. I have used this to have the class identify the “unifying themes” in biology, and to add a few that they overlooked.
That brings me to my last point, which is the usefulness of this tool. Only two weeks in to the semester, I have seen it uncover 3 misconceptions that I could help the students correct on the spot. The first is the one I mentioned above regarding some themes in biology that students overlooked. The second was a point of confusion between electron orbitals and energy levels (see above). The third was confusion about what an isomer actually is. I am admittedly a novice at constructing sound questions for this kind of assessment, but if I have already found these misconceptions, I’m hopeful that this approach will bear even more fruit as I improve at it.
Gravitropic 