Designing effective questions for classroom response system teaching

By Ian D. Beatty, W. Gerace, R. Dufresne. 2005

412 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Classroom response systems can be powerful tools for teaching physics. Their efficacy depends strongly on the quality of the questions. Creating effective questions is difficult and differs from creating exam and homework problems. Each classroom response system question should have an explicit pedagogic purpose consisting of a content goal, a process goal, and a metacognitive goal. Questions can be designed to fulfill their purpose through four complementary mechanisms: directing students' attention, stimulating specific cognitive processes, communicating information to the instructor and students via classroom response system-tabulated answer counts, and facilitating the articulation and confrontation of ideas. We identify several tactics that are useful for designing potent questions and present four “makeovers” to show how these tactics can be used to convert traditional physics questions into more powerful questions for a classroom response system.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Education, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d675419c03e8edc845d91b1f1c866464c5c275cf

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In Computer Science Applications

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Citations in the corpus

Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering. (2012, background): “However, several authors have offered suggestions for best practices with clicker technology (Beatty et al., 2006; Caldwell, 2007; Smith et al., 2009; Wieman et al., 2008), including posing formative assessment questions at higher cognitive levels and socially mediated conditions for learning such a”
Clickers in the large classroom: current research and best-practice tips. (2007, methodology): “…et al., 2006), premedical education (Roschelle et al., 2004a), medical, veterinary, and dental education (Draper, 2002; Draper and Brown, 2002), business (Cue, 1998; Roschelle et al., 2004a; Beekes, 2006), economics (Simpson and Oliver, 2006), and psychology (Draper, 2002; Draper and Brown, 2002).”
A Review of Literature Reports of Clickers Applicable to College Chemistry Classrooms (2008, methodology): “The University of Massachusetts group proposes a method called ‘Assessing-to-Learn’ (A2L) (Dufresne and Gerace, 2004) or question-driven instruction ( Beatty et al., 2006 ).”
Examining Teachers’ Instructional Moves Aimed at Developing Students’ Ideas and Questions in Learner-Centered Science Classrooms (2012, background): “The kinds of questions and questioning practices teachers employ can provoke student thinking and encourage students to generate their own questions to guide inquiry (Beatty et al. 2006; van Zee and Minstrell 1997).”
Examining the benefits and challenges of using audience response systems: A review of the literature (2009, background): “…of ARS questions available in most fields, so instructors have to develop original questions, a process that is very time consuming (Allen & Tanner, 2005; Beatty et al., 2006; Boyle, 2006; El-Rady, 2006; Fagan et al., 2002; Freeman et al., 2007; Horowitz, 2006; Paschal, 2002; Robertson, 2000).”
Synthesis of Discipline-Based Education Research in Physics. (2014, background): “[275] suggest several ways in which questions can be crafted to include subtle or common student conceptions, such as sequencing two”